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INTERVIEWS CURRENCY

6 TAKE THESE BROKEN WINGS 68 AFTERSUN

Kelly Reichardt on Showing Up By Jason Anderson
By Adam Nayman
70 ALCARRÀS
24 THE SEA INSIDE By Saffron Maeve
Helena Wittmann on
Human Flowers of Flesh 72 ENYS MEN
By Jordan Cronk By Angelo Muredda

34 TIMELY CIRCUMSTANCES 74 UN ÉTÉ COMME ÇA

Cyril Schäublin on Unrest By Katherine Connell
By Jay Kuehner
76 FIRE OF LOVE
46 WHAT IS CINEMA? By Madeleine Wall
Olivier Assayas on Irma Vep
By Beatrice Loayza 78 NOPE
By Robert Koehler

FEATURES
COLUMNS
12 TELLING THE TRUTH CAN BE
DANGEROUS BUSINESS 5 EDITOR’S NOTE
The Overdue Enshrinement
of Elaine May 52 TV OR NOT TV
By Christoph Huber The Rehearsal
By Kate Rennebohm
20 CAN THE CENTRE HOLD?
The Films of Adirley Queirós 55 GLOBAL DISCOVERIES ON DVD
By James Lattimer By Jonathan Rosenbaum

31 SATAN’S LIMBO 58 DEATHS OF CINEMA

Alexander Sokurov’s Fairytale Peter Brook
By Michael Sicinski By Celluloid Liberation Front

39 MYTHS OF NEW ENGLAND 60 BOOKS

On Michael Roemer’s The Afterimage Reader
Vengeance Is Mine By Phil Coldiron
By Lawrence Garcia
64 FILM/ART
42 THE MOTERN METHOD Tacita Dean on Fata Morgana
The Films of Matt Farley and By Antoine Thirion
Charlie Roxburgh
By Will Sloan

PHOTO CREDITS: A24: Cover, 6, 9, 69; Adirley Queriós/Joana Pimenta: 20, 22, 23; Cyril Schäublin: 2, 34, 36, 38; Helena Wittmann: 24, 26, 27, 29; HBO: 46, 48, 49, 51, 53; Locarno Film
Festival: 31, 33; Matt Farley and Charlie Roxburgh: 42, 44, 45; Mubi: 70, 71; Neon: 73, 76, 77; Oscilloscope: 11; Shellac: 75; Tacita Dean, Fata Morgana, 2022, 16mm colour film, silent, 22 min-
utes, continuous loop. Film still. Courtesy the artist; Frith Street Gallery, London and Marian Goodman Gallery, New York/Paris: 65, 67; The Estate of Hollis Frampton: 61; The Film Desk:
39, 40, 41; The Visible Press: 62, 63; Universal: 79; Viennale: 12, 14, 15, 17, 19, 59.
60th OCTOBER 20 –NOVEMBER 1, 2022
VIENNA
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 Editor’s Note
EDITOR AND PUBLISHER
Mark Peranson

ART DIRECTION AND DESIGN

Vanesa Mazza If anyone remembers last issue’s editor’s note from way back when, I did promise you more
ASSISTANT EDITOR
on Kelly Reichardt, and herein we deliver on that promise (ignore some of the other promises,
Peter Mersereau please, I’m not in control of everything). It’s been quite a banner year for Reichardt, with her be-
ing awarded the Carrosse d’or from the Quinzaine des réalisateurs (sic), her “little film” Showing
CONTRIBUTING EDITORS
Tom Charity, Christoph Huber, Up premiering in competition at Cannes, receiving the Pardo d’onore in Locarno, and not hav-
Dennis Lim, Adam Nayman ing to attend Toronto. I have no comment on the latter, as distributors have release plans and all
PRODUCTION AND that—or maybe Kelly isn’t vaccinated or has an outstanding warrant in Ontario, who knows—but
MARKETING MANAGER the fact that Showing Up is skipping TIFF to show up as a North American premiere at the New
Kayleigh Rosien
York Film Festival has no impact on the film’s presence in the magazine and on the cover. (Nor
FINANCIAL MANAGER were there any bribes from A24, though if you guys want to advertise, I’ve got the space: just email
Jennifer Scott [email protected] and we can make magic happen.)
WEB DESIGN There’s plenty of other TIFF-related content in here that I will doubt you will see elsewhere,
Adrian Kinloch such as interviews with Swiss filmmaker Cyril Schäublin and the one and only Tacita Dean, and
COPY EDITING
a feature on the films of Adirley Queirós. Plus we are back at full strength online with our usual
Jack Vermee expansive festival coverage, which is archived for your post-festival pleasure. In fact, in print over
the last few issues we managed to cover all of the Wavelengths feature films, which was not a dif-
Cinema Scope (ISSN 1488-7002) (HST ficult task as at this year’s festival there are only eight of them, which is about the same size as the
866048978rt0001) is published quarterly by television section; meanwhile, the Wavelengths short film programs, long a staple of the festival,
Cinema Scope Publishing. Issue 92. Vol. 24, No. 3.
have this year been whittled down to two. (Hell, one of these features was even on the cover way
parts of this publication may be reproduced in any
form without permission. All articles remain prop- back in March—and that’s the exception that doesn’t even prove the rule, because it’s Canadian.)
erty of their authors. Submissions are eagerly Yes, there are a few other premieres in Toronto from auteurs that we know and love, such as
encouraged. Distributed in Canada through
Disticor Direct, Magazines Canada, in the US
Hong Sangsoo and Ulrich Seidl, but the burgeoning presence of world premieres of streaming
through Disticor, and worldwide through Annas content—as opposed to “older” films that a fair bit of the local audience will want to see in cine-
International. Cinema Scope is found online at
mas—is more than a bit concerning. I don’t want to be too harsh, as there’s no accounting for taste
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Take These Broken Wings
Kelly Reichardt on Showing Up

BY ADAM NAYMAN
After previously playing a dog person for Kelly Reichardt in to the ways that local cultures get variously usurped, bought up,
Wendy and Lucy (2008), Michelle Williams is now a cat person and commodified, and to the attendant vaporization of local uto-
in Showing Up. Quietly intense in her wardrobe of shapeless pias. These themes were taken to a relatively epic extreme in the
earth tones, sullenly poking around Portland in crocs and socks, tragicomic capitalist allegory of First Cow (2019), whose entre-
Williams’ Lizzy is finishing up a degree at the Oregon College of preneurial heroes got busy seasoning a nation’s melting point and
Art and Craft (OCAC), where she specializes in sculpture. Her ended up as skeletons in history’s closet.
rent-paying job in the school’s front office—under the watch- Besides the reliably gorgeous landscapes and reliably anguished
ful eye of the department supervisor (Maryann Plunkett), who politics, First Cow’s most outstanding element was its intent, tac-
happens to be her mother—enables her to share her two-floor, tile presentation of skilled hands at work. In a turn that will sure-
studio-basemented apartment with a pushy orange tabby whom ly excite cinephiles whose cinematic Venn diagrams encompass
Lizzy can barely seem to keep in Kibble. both Reichardt and Michael Mann, the director has doubled down
From Robert Altman to Hal Ashby to the Coens, using a feckless on depictions of process in Showing Up. The first time we see Jo,
feline as shorthand for a loner’s stubbornest traits is an old trick. she’s lazily but very delicately assembling a tire swing in her back-
Reichardt, however—who by now is no less than the aforemen- yard, which is a good way to act distracted while a tenant (that’d
tioned a Great American Filmmaker—makes the device work on be Lizzy) angrily asks her to deal with their property’s sputtering
her own, more naturalistic terms. Whether malingering by its per- hot-water pipes. Jo’s relaxed dexterity anticipates her loom-based
petually empty bowl or jutting her claws out from underneath a artworks, while elsewhere, the ever-genial Eric (André Benjamin)
closed basement door, Lizzy’s roommate exudes the coiled, ambi- projects the same even, low-level warmth as his beloved communal
ent agitation of a creature bridling against its own domestication. kiln. As for Lizzy, her painstakingly shaped array of Giacomettian
When the animal mauls a pigeon that’s crept into the bathroom, ceramics—all female forms, with lanky limbs that fold and splay in
it’s as if it were acting out some tetchy, subconscious impulse on every direction—are obviously self-portraits, and the fine motor
its owner’s behalf. skills exercised in their creation exist in tender, ironic counterpoint
The cat doesn’t finish the job. “Please go outside to die,” Lizzy to the slovenly little sprawl of their maker’s existence: the red-eyed
urges the wounded intruder while sweeping it up and out the all-nighters without a shower; the thankless busywork of fliers and
window. The next morning, though, she’s coerced into caring invitations; the distressing check-ins with friends and family mem-
for the bird by her neighbour-slash-landlord-slash-classmate Jo bers consumed (or devoured) by their eccentric passions (e.g., her
(Hong Chau), another aesthete whose subtly overbearing Good possibly mentally ill brother [John Magaro], who’s literally and
Samaritan act—bandaging the victim’s wounds and nestling it figuratively digging himself deeper into a hole); the Tupperware
into a cozy shoebox of its own—inspires what would seem to be lunches on campus, staring hypnotized towards a horizon that just
a desired mix of resentment, shame, and competitiveness. Lizzy keeps receding behind the clouds.
and Jo’s relationship, which we join in medias res and clearly Thus comes the other big temptation with watching and writing
extends beyond the purview of Christian Blauvelt’s fine-grained about Showing Up: to perceive Lizzy and her quotidian struggles
frames, is intimate but ambiguous: as ever, when it comes to ques- to have her work seen and catalogued as a stand-in for a certain
tions of dramaturgy, Reichardt opts for a less-is-more approach. woman behind the camera, and the film as whole as Reichardt’s
The same goes for her symbolism: in a lesser or more obvious Pygmalionesque reckoning with her own intertwining vocations
movie, it would be spelled out that Lizzy and Jo’s joint Florence as a filmmaker and a lecturer. (In May, Williams told Variety that
Nightingale act on behalf of a helpless bird was a metaphor for her director teaches at Bard partially because she doesn’t get
their own healing relationship. Instead, in the deceptively offhand health insurance through the DGA.) Whether Reichardt would
context of Reichardt’s art-world comedy, it’s just another sweetly ever admit that this synchronicity is deliberate (and there’s some-
puttering running joke. thing to be said for directors who take the Fifth), the film plays
Given its Pacific Northwestern setting and episodic, quasi- unmistakably with the contingencies—ideological, economical,
sketch-comical structure, it’s tempting to call Showing Up emotional, philosophical—of what noted sculptor David Lynch
Reichardt’s version of Portlandia, with Lizzy and Jo’s foundling has called “the Art Life,” especially in a place that nurtures such
serving as a neatly coincidental manifestation of that IFC se- aspirations while implicitly delineating their limits. Familiarity
ries’ greatest catchphrase: the repeated exhortations by Fred breeds all kinds of things, and the weekly cycles of in-crowd ex-
Armisen and Carrie Brownstein’s hipster interior decorators to hibitions and openings have an Exterminating Angel aspect to
their clout-chasing clients to “put a bird on it” (“it” being any- them—a Sisyphean roundelay of cheese plates and veiled, careful
thing at all). Such matters of gentrification were surely germane compliments, a year’s work elevated as a conversation piece or re-
to Reichardt’s 2016 Montana triptych Certain Women, with its duced to small talk.
big-box strip malls and curt, devastating middle section about sly In 2019, the OCAC was closed after restructuring efforts “could
city mice trying to bilk an elderly homesteader out of his valuable not sufficiently eradicate the rising costs of running a private arts
antique stones. There, Williams’ bourgeois character’s lilting bird college in the 21st century.” In a gesture of bittersweet defiance
calls to the ancient René Auberjonois suggested a disingenuous that doubles as a kind of pre-COVID time machine (ditto the prev-
act of solidarity across class and generational lines. Like her fellow alence of cell-phone calls over text messages), Reichardt and her
left-leaning regionalist John Sayles, Reichardt’s eyes are peeled collaborators have resurrected the campus as a bustling hub of

7
self-directed creation, integrating lingering glances at various stu- Reichardt: Like everything, it’s a process. There’s no grand ap-
dent works and projects in between the plot points (such as they proach—we are just in it and doing the work at hand, considering
are). These interstitials are funny, but never judgmental; they’re the moment we are in and deciding what that moment is about.
sight gags, but never punchlines. The narrative device of building Sometimes things are coming through in performance, and some-
gradually towards Lizzy’s first solo exhibition—and establishing times through the frame. Michelle is always focused on Lizzy, and
that a big New York art-world powerbroker is slated to attend— I’m also thinking about the bigger picture of the story.
recalls the arc of Christopher Guest’s Waiting for Guffman (1996), Scope: There’s a common thread in your movies of very insular,
but without the satirical, burlesquing condescension. Rather than self-sustaining communities; the wagon train in Meek’s Cutoff;
inviting us to laugh at its characters for their solipsism, Showing the farms in Night Moves (2013); the fort in First Cow (very dif-
Up sweetly celebrates (though not consecrates) the persistence of ferent context, but still); I also thought of the insularity in Old Joy
their vision, and does its best to align it with our own. A late shot (2006), the idea of creating a small little world and living inside of
of the whole motley ensemble with their eyes lifted to the sky is an it. Is this a denial of the larger America? An attempt to live beyond
ideal grace note—they’re looking for something elusive, vanish- it? To what extent is this small Oregon college/college town root-
ing, vulnerable, and real. ed in reality, and how much of it is a bit of a fantasy? And how does
your own work as a teacher go into making a movie that’s largely
about inter-faculty relationships?
Cinema Scope: What went into the decision to make Lizzy a Reichardt: The Oregon College of Art and Craft was a real place
sculptor? Was there an artist or a piece that shaped the idea of and an important institution for the Pacific Northwest ceramics
making a movie about that particular artform? I assume the script scene for 112 years. It closed its doors in 2019. The college had a
predated the sculptures themselves—were the female statues few different locations over the decades—we were lucky enough
made to order based on the writing, or did you take writing inspi- to film in the funky buildings in southwest Portland that were
ration from them once they were done? And how much did the built in 1979, before a renovation got underway; it’s becoming a
sculptural work showcased in the movie come to inform Michelle private middle school. The OCAC campus became our hub. The
Williams’ performance? rooms were empty when we arrived, but the art department used
Kelly Reichardt: The script was written with Cynthia Lahti’s the woodshop and wardrobe took over the basement; it became a
work in mind. Everything in the film is handmade; no moulds were functioning place. Local artisans were hired to make what would
used. Jon Raymond has known Cynthia for 20-some years. I was be the student art in the film, so things were getting made in all
very familiar with her work. I also had Michelle Segre’s artwork of the classrooms: dying fabrics, ceramics, and weaving. Week by
in mind for Jo. Chris Blauvelt and I had already filmed Michelle week, the school was coming to life during pre-production. Then
in her Bronx studio for a short film I made for the Pompidou. And came the kids that would play the students in the film. They had
the glass pieces that are the work of Marlene, the visiting artist to learn all the crafts, so there was teaching and learning going on
(played by Heather Lawless), is the artwork of Jessica Jackson and a real community was forming.
Hutchins. I had filmed Jessica for that same Pompidou project. My filmmaking world and teaching world collided. My col-
Michelle took some classes with Cynthia here in Portland, and league Ben Coonley even flew out and built a Buckminster Fuller–
Hong Chau worked with Michelle Segre in the Bronx studio. The type structure. That was a real highlight for me, having Ben there
characters were quite different than the real artist to my mind, but and having him work with production designer Tony Gasparro
also the artwork is so personal I’m sure there’s some crossover. and the Showing Up art team.
Scope: Keeping on the idea of sculpture/physical artwork, the It is sort of an idealized world. I’ve been interested in Black
movie is filled with all these moments of people working in very tac- Mountain College for a long time, and that approach to teaching
tile, hands-on ways, like when Jo makes the tire swing in the opening I’m sure influenced the design of OCAC and Bard, and was in my
scenes. Maybe you could talk about that idea of filming very physical, mind while creating the school for Showing Up.
three-dimensional work—and, more generally, putting artistic pro- Scope: More technically, how the hell did you film with real and
cess (as opposed to necessarily finished artworks) onscreen? robot pigeons? Is this the most complicated special-effects thing
Reichardt: The idea was to show the process—how artmaking in any of your movies? It’s a short list, I know.
is like eating and sleeping for some people. The daily rituals, rou- Reichardt: I don’t really want to give away things in the movie,
tine, and labour that goes into making work, whether there’s an but there are only two very brief moments in the film where the
audience or not. It’s somewhat about artmaking as an extension bird isn’t a real bird. It’s not one bird doing everything, but they
of life—not separate from your friends, your day job, your sense of are real birds for the most part.
humour, or whatever else. Scope: What can you tell me about the wardrobe choices on
Scope: How has your process with Michelle Williams changed this movie—there’s so much beige. I feel like the clothes are funny,
after so many films together? This is the biggest role she’s had but there’s also something in there about comfort, not needing to
since Wendy and Lucy; it’s an ensemble, but much more than in keep up appearances or “make a scene.” It’s a bohemian scene, and
Meek’s Cutoff (2010) or Certain Women, she carries the film. It’s a everybody’s sort of slovenly. The exceptions are the New York vis-
performance with a lot of interior space, and I’d love to hear you itors—and that contrast seems maybe important to an idea about
talk about how it was achieved. art as a career versus art for its own sake.

8
 Reichardt: Michelle’s character wears some beige. Lizzy is Reichardt: One image gets its meaning from the image you
working with colour in her art. Her clothes are like having a uni- put next to it. Figuring out what the right shooting strategy is for
form: she can get dressed without a lot of thought. She would like a film has nothing to do with some other film I’ve made. You can
the attention to be elsewhere, not on her. I wouldn’t say that she only live in one film at a time. A lot of figuring out how I wanted
has decided that she isn’t trying to make a career out of art—every- to shoot this film came with the location of Lizzy and Jo’s apart-
one has their dreams and ambitions, and the world makes some ment building. I know this building well. I’ve stayed in Lizzy’s
of those decisions for you, as does luck. There are a lot of factors apartment, my friends have been in and out of that apartment
outside of the art itself. And yes, New York is more formal than complex. The upstairs/downstairs of it was really appealing—
Portland. Lizzy is working at her home studio; the New York art these friends are living next door to each other, so they are al-
dealer is on a trip. We should mention that the costume designer ways on top of one another, hearing each other’s comings and
on Showing Up is April Napier. goings. Spending enough time in that location, figuring out how
Scope: On First Cow, you and Christopher Blauvelt used digital to shoot Lizzy in her space, helped to inform how the rest of the
video to mimic celluloid grain. I’ve not read one way or another movie would be shot.
if the look here was also a trick, but I was reminded mostly of the What you refer to as “insert shots” I would never think of like
look of Certain Women. Can you talk about the shooting choices that. An insert shot is meant to show you something—that’s not
here, and particularly how you as a director wanted to frame/film what’s happening here. This isn’t like, “Look at the gun under the
inanimate objects? pillow!” These are the sculptures Lizzy is living with: they’re on
Reichardt: Every movie has its own recipe. We have references her shelves, and in her mind, and in the process of being made.
and we do tests and try to get the film to look the way we want it to Scope: I’m going to slip this one in here: how much can we read
look for the movie we’re working on, finding the look that works into a movie about self-portraiture—and sort of tortured, ambiva-
with the story that we are telling. That’s done with finding a colour lent self-portraiture—as your own version of same?
palette, picking lenses, film stock when we’re shooting film, an ap- Reichardt: Our original idea was to write a biography about
proach to lighting—these things all come into play, including the Canadian painter Emily Carr. We wanted to cover the decade of
time of year we’re shooting in. her life when she took in renters with the hope that being a land-
Scope: There are so many close-ups and inserts of pieces lord would allow her more time to paint as opposed to having a day
here, which take the place a bit of the landscapes in your other job. In fact, her tenants took over her world and she had less time
movies. At times, it feels like you’re shooting Lizzy’s pieces espe- to paint than ever. That was our starting point: an artist trying to
cially as characters… balance art with making an income.

9
 When Jon Raymond and I went to Canada we found out just was on my mind a lot when thinking about what Lizzy might look
how iconic your beloved Carr is—not at all as obscure as we had like. The part of Eric the kiln guru had to be an easy presence in
presumed. Anyway, that couldn’t work, because we didn’t want a the film. He plays an important role at the school: he’s a very roll-
famous artist. So we came home and turned to the artist people with-it guy, and that is not Lizzy at all. I got so used to looking at
we know, to the art scene here in Portland. No one is any one per- André’s face—he seemed the perfect vibe for Eric, and he was!
son—Jo and Lizzy are mixed bags, and they’re fictional and shaped As to the music, André was roaming around playing his flute all
to fit our story. the time, as he does when he isn’t needed on set. It was lovely hav-
Scope: Where did the idea of an artist family come from? There ing that sound waft through the air and through the windows or
are different approaches to art as practice (and profession) in across the yard. On the last day of filming at the school André went
Lizzy’s family, and they’re all sort of in conflict with each other out into the field and let us record him playing. In the editing I had
throughout the movie: different mediums, different ambitions, his flute there to do with what I wanted.
different ways to have (or not have) a day job. In some of your films, Scope: Do you feel like this is the most explicit comedy you’ve
family relationships are either off to the side or in the background; ever made? There are moments of humour in almost all of your
here, they come increasingly into focus as the movie goes on. films—and the comedy here is quite deadpan—but it feels like
Reichardt: The artist family structure was something Jon there’s something in your directing that’s more about pace and
Raymond had in mind. He’s riffing off various friends and families timing and reaction shots or gestures than ever before. Are you a
and dynamics that are close to him. This mix of people got turned fan of any comedic directors in particular?
into the fictionalized Carr family. A whole new dynamic comes about Reichardt: We thought we were writing a film that was partly
when the actors arrive and are reacting to each other in a scene. comedic in tone. I can find a lot to laugh at with liberal arts while
Scope: Did you come to cast André Benjamin based on High still believing liberal arts are super-important. Some of the situ-
Life (2018)? He’s such a relaxed, lovely presence in this movie— ations in Showing Up are comical, but the people aren’t stereo-
the most relaxed in the movie. What was the impetus to have him types—we really tried to stay away from that. I’m a fan of Elaine
contribute flute music to the soundtrack? May, Mike Leigh, Jacques Tati, Albert Brooks…I was revisiting
Reichardt: Gayle Keller was the casting person on Showing Up, Lukas Moodysson’s Together (2000) not long ago, that film makes
and I think she first brought up André. I found this photo of him me laugh. A somewhat recent discovery for me is Anne Bancroft’s
with his big smile wearing a pair of overalls, and I just had that film Fatso (1980), with Dom DeLuise. Can’t show that in a liberal
on my wall for a while with other faces—like Lee Bontecou, who arts class.

Meek’s Cutoff

11
 A New Leaf

Telling the Truth Can

Be Dangerous Business
The Overdue Enshrinement of Elaine May

BY CHRISTOPH HUBER

It’s not as if Elaine May wasn’t a beloved figure in American popular May as well eventually found her way to the director’s chair, af-
culture for most of her life. Her successful pairing with Mike Nichols ter having played romantic interests in two largely forgotten 1967
as an innovative improv comedy team in the late ’50s may have been comedies, Carl Reiner’s autobiographical Enter Laughing and Clive
short-lived—the duo broke up at the height of their success in 1961— Donner’s Luv—both based on long-running Broadway properties,
but is regularly cited as one of the most influential and well-re- neither of which May had starred in on stage (though Nichols had di-
membered comedy acts the US has ever known. Subsequently, May rected the latter, which garnered him his second Tony). Reportedly,
embarked on a respectable career as a playwright and performer on May wrote the script for her first venture behind the camera, A
and off Broadway, which allowed her to branch out into the cinema, New Leaf (1971), without an intention of directing it herself, or
just as her former partner-turned-filmmaker Nichols had followed to act as the second lead—both of which ultimately ended up hap-
up his own successes as a Broadway director with the filmic double pening, because of her agent’s negotiations. With this, she became
whoopee of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1966) and The Graduate only the third woman in the sound era—after Dorothy Arzner and
(1967), establishing himself as one of Hollywood’s hottest tickets. Ida Lupino—to direct feature films for a major Hollywood studio.

12
What followed was one of the most impressive directorial careers in This, I feel, is the answer to a conundrum that plagued this young
the American cinema, but, famously, also one of the most embattled. cinephile in his teenage years: how could it be that films as uniformly
Starting with A New Leaf, May embarked on a series of four films excellent as May’s mostly had such a bad reputation? As a film-buff
whose remarkable darkness is barely mitigated by the fact that teenager, the only way I could encounter May’s work in my neck of
three of them are classified as comedies. More importantly, with the woods was through German-language television, which is how I
the exception of her sophomore outing The Heartbreak Kid (1972)— had my initial, love-at-first-sight viewing of A New Leaf. As a devotee
notably also her only feature that was not considered a box-office of Walter Matthau, I would catch anything he starred in, yet there
disappointment—all ran into considerable production trouble, as had been slight caveats about this film in both a Matthau biography
May’s penchant for shooting extraordinary amounts of film collid- (highly undistinguished in retrospect, but one of the few books on
ed with changes of studio regimes mid-production. Mikey and Nicky film translated into German and actually available in the provincial
(1976), her “serious” outlier—though actually just a transposition backwaters where I grew up during the late ’80s) and the television
of her themes and worldview into a slightly different register—was magazines that served as major sources of information, all of which
rejected with uncommon vitriol; however, this had nothing on the cited a troubled production. This primed me for a minor pleasure at
reactions to what was supposed to be her comeback, Ishtar (1987), best, yet what I saw instead was one of Matthau’s finest performanc-
which was famously treated as one of the most notorious flops in es, not to mention a subversive approach to romantic comedy (and
the history of Hollywood. (In May’s own characteristically funny luxury) that far outweighed the smallish drawback of what seemed
words: “If all of the people who hate Ishtar had seen it, I would be a like a tacked-on happy ending (and even that was not so clear-cut,
rich woman today.”) on further reflection).
Since then, May has given us a couple of well-received perfor- A few years later, this admirer of John Cassavetes was shocked to
mances—including in In the Spirit (1990), a minor but quite May- encounter in Mikey and Nicky a film that, from the look to the lead
like effort that is the only directorial credit of noted acting coach actors, seemed like prime Cassavetes, yet was even more trenchant
Sandra Seacat—and got good notices for writing two scripts for Mike than anything he had ever done—including my favourite film of his,
Nichols: the Americanized La Cage aux folles remake The Birdcage The Killing of a Chinese Bookie (which was released in the same year,
(1996), and the Clinton campaign-à-clef dramedy Primary Colors 1976). Given that this film’s tone was completely different from that
(1998), the latter of which earned her a second Academy Award of A New Leaf, I became even more fascinated by May, who was still
nomination (following the one shared with Warren Beatty for the a barely known directorial entity in the literature accessible to me
1978 fantasy Heaven Can Wait). But the tide truly turned in her fa- at a time when the internet as we know it was barely beginning to
vour in the last decade, which has seen May taking home a series of take shape. Once again, the mainstream TV guides unhelpfully filled
career achievement awards that range from the National Medal of that void, referring to Mikey and Nicky as a flop that tried to imitate
the Arts that Barack Obama decorated her with in 2013 to the honor- the mastery of Cassavetes but failed, apart from the acting. Lost on
ary Oscar given to her at the Academy Awards this past March—the me was the irony that Cassavetes had often faced similar putdowns
latter of which surely indicates, even as ever-fewer people actually in the US press, as I grew up in a European world where he had
spend time following the Oscars (let alone caring about them), that long been considered a great, independent artist, and naturally as-
the curious controversy that effectively nixed her major-studio di- sumed it had always been that way all around the world. (Of course,
rectorial career has been swept under the rug. looking into something like Halliwell’s Film Guide years later, I’d
Judging from public appearances, May, who turned 90 this April, see that back in the day Chinese Bookie had been chided in com-
is still going strong and has lost none of her wit. Tributes all over the parable ways: “Why he keeps on trying in the face of indifference is
world have been coming in during the last decade, abetted by her tri- beyond comprehension...”)
umphant and also multiply awarded performance as an Alzheimer- And so I ventured to the video store to rent Ishtar, a film that, sight
stricken art-gallery owner in the 2018 Broadway revival of Kenneth unseen, was considered a joke in my youth. As such, it should have
Lonergan’s 1999 play The Waverly Gallery. This year, her nonagenar- been interesting to a budding film lover by default: after all, contrari-
ian anniversary has brought in another load of deserved showcas- an distrust of the mainstream is one of the defining properties of any
es of her directorial work, with one upcoming at the Viennale this nerd culture. In the case of my own young self, however, the dreadful
October—which seems as good a reason as any to take this look back impression I had of Ishtar came not just from the misleading con-
at a body of work that is outstanding in its committed and uncom- sensus that it was a failed mainstream comedy whose worst sin was
promising view of humanity as being deeply scarred by flaws and being far too expensive and not funny enough, but also from the fact
perfidy, while withholding one-sided judgment. Whether naively that it starred Dustin Hoffman and Warren Beatty, two actors whose
upbeat, cringe-inducingly ass-kissing, or Dracula-black deceitful, annoying importance was exacerbated by their visible vanity, re-
May’s protagonists are still characterized with a rare ambivalence, gardless of them having been in some New Hollywood films I great-
as their creator has the grace to indulge their shortcomings in the ly admired. (In fact, Hoffman’s strenuously self-conscious actorly
face of weaknesses we all know too well. After all, the aspect of her bravado had almost sunk some of them for me—although not The
work that is most unforgiving is her satiric description of people as Graduate, which seemed lacking in bite almost as much as it over-
willing victims, imagining ourselves as free agents when we are ac- did the dated zeitgeist.) And, of course, when I’d first read and heard
tually trapped in the throes of a capitalist system that has warped about Ishtar, the name of its director had meant nothing to me—
our world beyond recognition by making us succumb to its promises. but now, Elaine May suddenly was the main reason to take a look.

13
 Ishtar

To my merriment, May not only hilariously sent up the vanity of Part of the reason her career stalled seems to be a simple case
both her stars—with their complicity, I realized, which consequently of sexism, which has always been structurally ingrained in the
highly improved my regard for both (even as I must admit that, to Hollywood system. Not only was May unusually gifted, but she
this day, my favourite Hoffman moment is seeing him being tooth- was a perfectionist and allegedly a somewhat neurotic presence—
tortured in Marathon Man [1976])—but also clearly and smartly made all traits that can be forgiven in male “masters” from Stanley
fun of Reaganite politics. (That she did so in the guise of a modern Kubrick to Woody Allen, but which seem to have been considered
Crosby-and-Hope Road picture—which seemed an important ref- indefensible when associated with a woman (and one with a very
erence point on the film’s home turf—meant absolutely nothing to unusual profile, to boot). On the other side of the coin, even though
me, as this had never been part of the world and culture I grew up in, May repeatedly sued the studios over various disputes, her steadfast
but the satire still worked well without my knowing this reference.) downplaying of her achievements didn’t exactly align with certain
Furthermore, since Ishtar had been such an infamous cause célèbre, feminist agendas. Still, today she probably stands as the pioneer of
I could actually check out some contemporaneous reviews to help the first (and still very limited, when you crunch the numbers) real
me figure out why such a sweet (though deliciously sting-in-the-tail) influx of female filmmakers into ’70s Hollywood (it’s worth remem-
comedy was treated so noxiously and regarded as one of the worst bering that Barbara Loden’s Wanda, released in 1970, was a wholly
films ever made—and, unlike the self-consciously weighty Heaven’s independent affair), which has surely contributed to her overdue
Gate (1980), had not even been rehabilitated in Europe. moment(s) in the spotlight in these times. (Although, apart from
Of course, one has to point out that even at the time, all of May’s her mid-length and quite intriguing 2016 PBS American Masters
“flops” had their critical admirers. (In May’s case, the “flop” label documentary on Nichols, which seems to double no more major film
was connected foremost to perceived financial failure, starting with projects have emerged from her, despite occasional rumours about
A New Leaf—which actually did make money, just less than expected. upcoming solo work or projects with her now-deceased longtime
Even Ishtar likely doesn’t qualify as a flop on those terms anymore, partner, Stanley Donen.)
as ancillary has allowed it to earn more than it cost over the years.) Beyond her ill-fit with preconceived gender roles, May’s most
As online resources got better, for instance, I would learn via ardent taboo-breaking transgression is the disdain her work evinces for
May admirer Jonathan Rosenbaum about how, after a crisis with the American Dream even as she plays with the allure of that trope
Paramount, Mikey and Nicky had originally been released in a hastily to invite identification with her protagonists, albeit an identifica-
assembled version full of continuity errors, and was only later re- tion that is full of awkwardness and ambivalence. Rosenbaum has
stored to the director’s cut which I had seen, and which, I learned, repeatedly compared May to Erich von Stroheim, and although I
had first been shown at MoMA—meaning that there clearly had see where he’s coming from, I would contend that May is even more
been some prestigious support for May-as-director already. As I re- subversive in that she allows empathy for all her characters even
encountered May’s films over the years (and also finally saw the one when she submits them to spot-on caricature. Even at her most
which had long escaped me, The Heartbreak Kid), several times on acidulous, she reveals in her characters a tragic human essence
the big screen, it became clear to me that she was a genuine maver- that persists in spite of the warped (self-)images promoted by the
ick, in the sense that every time she had managed to take big studio capitalist way of life, that cannot be completely wiped out by the
money, she had always radically undercut all the notions of what interlinked power structures—social prestige and position, rules
makes a solid studio picture. of conduct, or simply money—that govern their (and our) world. So

14
 The Heartbreak Kid

while it may seem impossible to recount May’s career without re- me from slouching.”) and proceeds with his plan of killing his newly-
sorting to the business story dictated by the system, a true tribute to wed wife in order to resume the lifestyle he has perfected: the art of
her genius should simply try to capture the greatness of each of her being useless. Yet in a world where everyone is seemingly incapable
works, in and of themselves. of dignity or honesty (only Henrietta, as the prototypical May naïf,
possesses the latter trait), Henry unwillingly winds up discovering
unexpected qualities within himself.
A New Leaf. The very first moments of May’s first film already pro- Even though the most challenging aspect of May’s original con-
vide an exemplary demonstration of her ability to subtly transform ception—which had Henry becoming a multiple murderer, though
terrible insights—i.e., that life has become a commodity—into amus- not in the way he intended—was eliminated in a recut of the film
ing comic bits (a legacy of her improv routines?). As an ominous by new Paramount studio head Robert Evans, A New Leaf excels at
EEG signal beeps over the opening credits, Henry Graham (Walter turning the screwball formula topsy-turvy by asking the audience
Matthau) seems to be standing in a hospital room, ostensibly steeling to identify with a protagonist who is not only a would-be killer, but
himself as he awaits the worst news from a group of grave-looking whose narcissistic lifestyle and haughty weariness are the quin-
doctors…who turn out to be car mechanics with a dire diagnosis for tessential expression of the false promises of a culture of privilege
his sports car. It’s all downhill from there for useless heir Henry, as supposedly worth striving for. Matthau has never been better, con-
he soon thereafter finds out that he has squandered his riches and stantly giving the impression of being mildly disgruntled beneath a
embarks on hilarious farewell rounds of his mansion and favourite transparent but impeccably enacted veneer of polite resignation, as
spots (from his couturier to his exclusive club and the stables...), in if he really would overstrain himself should he actually start to give
his silly driver’s helmet, sobbing “I’m poor” as he waves goodbye to… expression to his persistent annoyance and frustration. It’s just not
mostly things. “I have no skills, no resources, no ambitions. All I am worth it—and thus he comes across as a well-behaved “gentleman”
or was ever was is rich, and that’s all I ever wanted to be,” Henry con- whose dissatisfaction is actually monstrous, and he’s all the more
fesses to his trusty butler (brilliantly given the appropriate stature loveable for it. Vice versa, the same applies to May with her bum-
by Brit vet Gerald Rose), only to then react with horror at his man- bling, Jerry Lewisesque incompetence.
servant’s proposed solution: “Marriage? You mean to a woman?”
Henry’s saving grace soon arrives in the graceless guise of clum- The Heartbreak Kid. My least-favourite May feature, but only
sy heiress Henrietta Lowell (May), who occasions a triple rug- because the others are so incredible. Though it’s attributed to Neil
staining disaster at a party that allows Henry to play the heroic Simon (who wrote the script), May’s sophomore outing is clearly
saviour, crowned by his immortal riposte to the offended hostess: hers through and through, as it instantly picks up on her debut’s
“Madam, I have seen many examples of perversion in my time, but themes and style. In the latter department, even though May’s fo-
your erotic obsession with your carpet is probably the most gro- cus on her actors may make her direction seem free of flourishes, the
tesque and certainly the most boring I have ever encountered.” film relaxedly fulfills great comedy’s demands for invisible precision
Suffering courtship over Mogen David extra heavy Malaga wine with work in its (often masterful) timing. A New Leaf had a perfect exam-
soda water and lime juice, during the course of which Henrietta in- ple of this in its unexpected use of an electric pepper mill by James
evitably drops the cocktail glasses, Henry ultimately proposes on the Coco, who starred in Otto Preminger’s neglected Such Good Friends
shards (“Kneeling on broken glass is my favourite pastime. It keeps from the same year—which, as it happens, was pseudonymously writ-

15
 Mikey and Nicky

ten by May, and shares its acerbic tone with The Heartbreak Kid, whose into a merciless examination of self-delusion, which could be per-
sourness creeps more strongly to the fore the longer it goes on. fectly crystallized in the repeated line: “I’m in athletic equipment.
Like Henry Graham, Heartbreak’s ostensible hero, Lenny Cantrow It’s interesting.”
(Charles Grodin, in a fearless performance: he doesn’t try for the
grumpy-uncle charm with which Matthau inevitably draws the au- Mikey and Nicky. This seems to me the summit of May’s cinema,
dience in), is a monstrous narcissist who is trying to ditch his new- the film in which the she sheds the mainstream-comedy skin to
lywed wife, albeit less fatally in his case. Shallow Lenny has mostly bring out her unsettling worldview in full—even as the scariest thing
been starved for sex, which his now-wife, Lila (a riveting and, ulti- about this chilling film is how much of it plays like a May comedy.
mately, unusually touching performance by May’s daughter, Jeannie Sending out the clowns, May brings home the desperation that is the
Berlin), has been postponing until marriage. But already on the way submerged source of so many laughs.
to their honeymoon resort, Lenny becomes disillusioned with Lila’s Basically, Mikey and Nicky is a long journey through the night, as
dreams (her habit of bringing up “the next 40 or 50 years” of their minor mobster Mikey (Peter Falk) is called upon by his old friend
marriage is a sustained and truly terrifying triumph of May’s way Nicky (John Cassavetes), who has gotten himself into trouble once
with running-gag dialogue), appearance, and manners. As in A New again. It’s a film of relentless paranoia—when they first leave the
Leaf, May manages to make the audience share the protagonist’s per- house, Nicky, who’s afraid of being set up for a hit, insists on chang-
spective even as she completely undercuts it, which underlines how ing clothes; Mikey complies, while adding ironically: “Why bother?
her satiric impulse always cuts both ways. What’s more, she makes There is no one out there, right?” Is he in on the contract for Nicky?
The Heartbreak Kid’s tale of alienation particularly salient by making This being a May film, you can be sure that he is (preceding a punch-
it explicitly Jewish: as Lenny encounters his dream shiksa (Cybill line from In the Spirit: “The Mafia is not gonna kill us and make it
Shepherd), he goes to extraordinary lengths to convince her WASP look like an accident…they’ll just kill us, they’re the Mafia!”), but she
dad (an impressively gruff Eddie Albert) to accept him into the family. engineers so many reversals, surprises, and complexities in the rela-
While this set-up would seem to allow for much frothy farce tionship between the two protagonists that the question of betrayal
in the crowd-pleasing Simon style, May quickly complicates the becomes moot, and the film begins to point to something deeper in
proceedings as she works her way towards a painful, protract- human relationships that far exceeds the genre hook.
ed separation dinner between Lenny and Lina (echoing a similar Instead of elevating her protagonists, May delves into their weak-
revelation-over-a-meal scene in Such Good Friends, even as many nesses, and as they make their nocturnal rounds she connects them
other elements are clearly intended as an answer to Nichols’ The with a handful of fascinating supporting characters who further
Graduate). From that sequence, she works her way towards a series complicate the picture, including a hitman (Ned Beatty) who pin-
of confrontations that seem to grant the self-absorbed Lenny his points the workings of the system when he complains, in true work-
wishes (throughout his courtship of Shepherd’s Kelly, he constant- ingman’s fashion, that his job doesn’t pay what it should; meanwhile,
ly, unconsciously underlines to her how their union would be the an episode with Matthau’s offscreen wife, Carol Grace (in her only
fulfillment of his dreams), but ultimately reveal them as the spectre big role outside of Matthau’s lone directorial effort, 1960’s Gangster
of a life that will consist of recurring disappointments and eternal Story), brings out the double standard in the underworld milieu’s
alienation. Beneath the guise of a bittersweet mainstream comedy, treatment of women in particularly piercing ways. Leitmotifs like
The Heartbreak Kid translates a seeming American success story time running out and communication breakdown are cannily inter-

17
 Ishtar

woven via mundane details, while the pseudo-realist style catches sight, with the proviso that all details pertaining are patently ridicu-
the flavour of a place and a time (May’s hometown of Philadelphia, lous. The film even opens with a side-splitting assemblage of the duo
in all its mid-’70s grit) as the title duo wanders the streets, having improvising what will become their signature song in the film, and
endless conversations in dens serving Schmidt’s beer or in private a ditty that might double as the artistic credo for May’s directorial
apartments, high on angst and conflicting emotions. Much time is career: “Telling the truth can be dangerous business / Honest and
spent sitting in the dark and worrying about the truth, if there is any. popular don’t go hand in hand / If you admit that you play the accor-
The most inglorious of endings suggests there is, and it is both un- dion / No one will hire you in a rock ’n’ roll band.”
welcome and definitive. Throughout the film, Chuck and Lyle are presented as both pit-
ifully untalented and tasteless—the super-stupid headbands with
Ishtar. “You never really appreciate your own country until you which they are first seen are hilarious in themselves, yet will be eas-
leave it,” says Chuck Clarke (Dustin Hoffman) to his partner, Lyle ily topped by the rich selection of dunce caps that Beatty goes on to
Rogers (Warren Beatty), as they’re midway on their misadventure sport—but enthusiastic to a degree that is disarming. Their dream
in the fictitious African country of Ishtar (which, not quite coinci- of rivalling Simon & Garfunkel may be one last echo of The Graduate
dentally, is the name of an ancient Mesopotamian goddess—origi- ( just as Nichols’ last film, Charlie Wilson’s War [2007], may be a less-
nally named Inanna—associated with love, war, beauty, sex, justice, er echo of Ishtar), whose smooth construction is bracketed by two
and political power). This is where they get mixed up with a scene- images of a window display that goes from success—“‘Dangerous
stealing blind camel and political intrigues that have to do with left- Business’ is as good as ‘Bridge Over Troubled Water’ any day of the
ist insurgents (their female contact, as played by Isabelle Adjani, is week,” Chuck claims with utter conviction at the sight of Simon &
both implausibly seductive as well as the only competent person Garfunkel’s greatest hits—to commercial failure, even as dreams
in the whole picture, apart maybe from Jack Weston as their wily, have come true. And really, you haven’t lived until you see Beatty
long-suffering agent) and the CIA, which is trying to keep in place a and Hoffman’s Rogers & Clarke lovingly massacre the doo-wop clas-
ruling Emir whose “palace is made of gold” even though his country’s sic “Little Darlin’” in front of a stunned audience, along with the
people “have never seen a refrigerator.” (Charles Grodin gives an- other brilliantly “believably bad” songs composed for the film by
other brilliant performance for May as the hapless heroes’ CIA con- Paul Williams (whose work here rivals his inspired compositions
tact, Jim Harrison; one of the leads even works in a Heartbreak Kid for Brian De Palma’s Phantom of the Paradise [1974], another long-
reference when he inquires, of Harrison’s profession, “Interesting underrated satiric dismantling of the entertainment business—
work?” Is this what became of Lenny?) though Ishtar in some ways one-ups it with its critical allegory of
In their deluded way, the spectacularly incompetent Chuck and Hollywood colonialism via the fusion of entertainment and politics).
Lyle serve as perfect avatars of US stupidity in the Third World (re- Still, it is worth noting that Ishtar is the mildest expression of the
calling an earlier funny exchange predicated on the mix-up of the trope that stands at the centre of all of May’s films, which is a betrayal
words “smug” and “schmuck”), with the difference being that they between two partners—a freshly married couple in the first two films,
are kind of loveable in their naïveté. Even more salient, however, two male best friends in the last two. However, May still allows that
may be how May uses them as a satiric representation of the artis- there may be something of comfort to be found in the mellowing of age:
tic process—a subject that Ishtar actually treats with uncommon in- as Chuck says at one point, “Life isn’t that bad. I just have a lot of pain.”

19
Dry Ground Burning

Can the Centre Hold?

The Films of Adirley Queirós

BY JAMES LATTIMER

The periphery is always the centre in the films of Adirley Queirós, their consequences seep into everything, time is fluid and impos-
whether in terms of the people and places at the focus of his atten- sible to pin down, and documentary is but one tool of many with
tion or the off-centre stylistic means he employs to explore their which to probe Brazil’s disparities. While all four films draw their
tribulations, and, by extension, those of Brazil. With this year’s force and inspiration from real-life events and frequently make
epic, multiple-prizewinning Dry Ground Burning (co-directed with use of specific documentary material, they are equally happy to dip
Portuguese filmmaker and academic Joana Pimenta) as perhaps into genres whose ties to the real are far less one-to-one. Queirós
their most prominent representative, the four feature-length works collaborates with the same core protagonists again and again: pre-
he has made since 2011 each burrow into different facets of Ceilândia dominantly non-professional actors whose own experiences flow
and Sol Nascente, two neighbouring satellite cities perched on the into their roles, even when they wander into the traditionally fic-
edge of Brazil’s Federal District, which is also home to the Brazilian tional realms of science fiction, the musical, the heist movie, or
capital; the starry lights of Brasília may still twinkle in the distance, the Western, with the use of these genres often functioning as a
but the privilege they represent could hardly feel further away. canny additional layer of commentary. And when different genres
Taken together, this quartet of films constantly build and expand and modes are blurred together so seamlessly, it hits all the hard-
upon one another as they forge a complex chronicle of recent er when carefully placed nuggets of unprocessed reality suddenly
Brazilian history, albeit one that shows total disdain for standard ap- shine forth from the mix.
proaches to historiography. Is the City Only One? (2011) is at once typical and atypical of
Within Queirós’ instinctively malleable, sui generis filmmaking Queirós’ approach. Unlike the films that will follow, it hews closer to
logic, effortlessly intersectional perspectives dominate, politics and conventional documentary territory and offers the sort of detailed

20
context and background information Queirós will subsequently fiction. Bathed in wan sunshine by day and cast in long shadows
eschew—although the fact that the end titles list the protagonists by night, this eerie vision of the city has been scrubbed clean of its
according to roles alongside their (similar) real names suggests former hustle and bustle, a likely consequence of the regular night
that some degree of slippage between reality and staging is already patrols and the hard-to-obtain passports necessary for passage to
at play. On the other hand, the film establishes the same character Brasília. Two of the film’s three protagonists are familiar faces, how-
structure that will become a convention of sorts in Queirós’ work, ever: Marquim do Tropa returns as some version of himself, a music
whereby a small group of loosely related protagonists, all of whom producer and DJ now ensconced in a streamlined, neon-lit studio;
are from the satellite cities and none of whom are white, are ob- while Dilmar Durães now plays Dimas Cravalanças, an agent of the
served going about their everyday lives. Brazilian state sent back from the year 2070 to collect evidence of
Is the City’s group consists of Nancy (Nancy Araújo), a now- past crimes against the Black community and the marginalized.
middle-aged singer who was once part of a children’s choir that sung They are joined by Sartana (Cláudio Irineu Shokito), a solitary man
a famous jingle to encourage those from the newly forming favelas with a prosthetic leg who, it turns out, both are looking for.
in Brasília to resettle in the newly founded Ceilândia (where, like Even with its science-fiction stylings and loose quest narrative,
Nancy—herself a victim of resettlement—they would find disap- White Out, Black In still spends significant time observing these
pointment); Zé (Wellington Abreu), a real-estate agent who spends three men’s everyday lives, which are only partially the product of
his time driving through the bustling, rapidly expanding satellite invention. While Cravalanças’ appealingly lo-fi video calls with his
city in search of lots to purchase; his friend Dildu (Dilmar Durães), future employees and his attempts at time travel in a metal contain-
a cleaner standing for office in the upcoming elections as a one-man er clearly belong to the realm of fantasy, Marquim’s radio shows,
political party to fight for the rights of the city’s disadvantaged in- Sartana’s attempts to source protheses for other people, and the
habitants; and Marquim (Marquim do Tropa), a music producer in a time they spend alone are structured by testimonies (often in voice-
wheelchair who Dildu commissions to write a jingle to help kickstart over) that could not be more real. As progressively emerges, both of
his moribund campaign. the men’s disabilities stem from a police raid on a regular Ceilândia
Each of these carefully chosen protagonists plays a role in illu- dance party called the Quarentão on March 5, 1986, where white
minating the past, present, and future of Ceilândia, as well as its people were allowed to leave while Black people were made to stay,
relationship to the Brazilian capital. Supplemented by archival with violent, lasting consequences. Photos of that very night repeat-
footage—including of Nancy’s own youthful performance, along edly flash up onscreen, serving for the viewer and Cravalanças alike
with various other pertinent documents—Nancy’s attempts to grap- as evidence to contextualize the state’s crimes, as well as embodying
ple with the ambivalence upon which her career rests also narrate the sort of parallel functions Queirós typically manages to extract
the troubling story of how Brasília birthed Ceilândia, while all the from documentary material—at once a means of giving a fictional
time that Zé spends in the car traversing both cities reveals their re- plot real-life consequence, a prop to advance said plot, and a sug-
spective topographies, rapid development, and obvious differences. gestion of what a counterarchive of Brazilian history might hold, its
Meanwhile, even with the help of Marquim’s catchy jingle (which continual visibility everything.
also plays over the closing credits), Dildu’s homespun campaign Queirós’ patient observation of Marquim and Sartana’s daily lives
proves a Sisyphean struggle, the most agonizing expression of which also gives considerable, unshowy attention to the specificities of
comes when he stumbles across the Workers’ Party election caval- their respective disabilities, whether dedicating suitable duration to
cade after his own one-vehicle parade has come to an unplanned the lift rides that Marquim must take every time to enter his studio,
stop. Whether in terms of jingles or of politics, it seems that success or highlighting Sartana’s intricate knowledge of the different types
is less determined by content or merit than by where you come from, of protheses. This decision shouldn’t be as striking as it is, but if films
and the (lack of ) machinery behind you. that give centre stage to people with disabilities are already a rarity,
Occasionally, the protagonists will also actively reference Queirós when said people are also Black and marginalized in terms of class,
and his film team, who sometimes appear briefly on camera as they the prodigious set of intersections being addressed here becomes
trail the protagonists in their various endeavours. To this latter end, unique indeed. The same sense of many ideas being explored at once
the film is largely shot handheld and digitally for a sense of immedi- also extends to genre, as Marquim’s radio shows function much like
acy, augmented by a few celluloid passages to give additional texture unconventional musical numbers. In particular, his opening rap
to the already heterogenous material, inserting an extra degree of monologue over a tune once played at the Quarentão comes across
distance and timelessness and serving as the film’s most overt for- as paradigmatic of how the singing in musicals acts as a conduit for
mal flourish. Yet, combined with the closing “cast” list in particular, feelings that are otherwise inexpressible, given an extra twist here
questions of staging already arise—for example, did the camera real- by the fact that these feelings are real.
ly just happen to be on hand to witness Dildu finding the cavalcade But it is Queirós’ approach to science fiction that represents the
only a few blocks away from where his car broke down? film’s most ingenious use of genre, starting from his deliberate omis-
There’s no mistaking the degree of staging on display in White sion of any temporal marker from the opening intertitle. With the
Out, Black In (2014), as the Ceilândia it shows is a very different past defined via the date of the Quarentão raid, and the future es-
beast from that of Is the City, not least in name. An opening title tablished as the moment over 80 years on when the crimes of the
that locates the film’s action in “Old Ceilândia,” a place that can’t state can finally be tried, the great, amorphous expanse of time cre-
be found on any map, immediately thrusts the film in the realm of ated in between represents a refusal to pin down the film’s reality

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 White Out, Black In

to one single present, allowing instead many possible ones to flow tary material—here, the politicians’ speeches that ushered in Dilma
together at the same time: real, fantastical, or somewhere in be- Rousseff’s controversial 2016 impeachment, which was presumably
tween, but all of them Brazil. If Brasília has always sold itself as a city unfolding at the time of filming—to reverberate all the louder. Heard
of endless future, thus sidestepping any critiques of its contempo- in voiceover, and often also listened to by the characters and insert-
rary reality, perhaps the most logical counterposition is to insist on ed into the temporal indeterminacy of the science-fiction setting—
the primacy of the present. an eternal present tense that, once again, lies somewhere between
The explosive protest mounted by Marquim that brings White a real past and an uncertain future—these various claims and coun-
Out, Black In to a close is echoed in far more muted fashion in Once terclaims on democracy are endowed with a fascinating multivalen-
There Was Brasília (2017), which retains the science-fiction set- cy. The sound of the centre disintegrating is heard live and in real
ting, the fluid approach to time, and many of the other coordinates time, documentary evidence of this process is archived and put on
of the previous film in order to hollow them out. Here, a now taci- display for future reference, and the ghostly, disembodied voices
turn Marquim once again sets a revolt in progress, whose dramat- reverberate across Brasília’s central esplanade until their words hit
ic highpoint in the final half hour is a choreographed show of force Ceilândia—both so near and so very far, as it has always been.
(with distinct shades of Mad Max [1979]) aided by Andreia (Andreia Sol Nascente is far from a distant planet in Queirós’ latest work,
Viera)—who has recently been released from the capital’s dystopian- which shifts the focus onto Ceilândia’s neighbouring district and
looking prison system after killing a man who groped her at a bar— brings women to the forefront for the first time. Clocking in at 153
and WA4 (a bearded Wellington Abreu), an intergalactic warrior minutes—almost an hour longer than the longest of Queirós’ previ-
from a planet called “Sol Nascente” who has crash-landed a few dec- ous films—Dry Ground Burning feels epic not only due to its running
ades too late to complete his mission: the assassination of Juscelino time, but also because it expands the scope of the previous films
Kubitschek, the former president of Brazil and political architect of even further, advancing the principles they established even as its
Brasília. However, the aftermath of this call to arms is as radically numerous direct callbacks to its predecessors gives it the bearing of
static as the protracted, largely plotless hour spent building up to it, a summation. So this means yet more shifts between yet more gen-
as the trio are observed in an even more emptied-out, purely noc- res; lengthy observations of all manner of everyday tasks, whether
turnal vision of the Federal District awash in yellow light, or in the authentic, imagined, or some combination of the two; a fresh set of
confines of WA4’s spaceship. intersections that are rarely seen onscreen; and intrusions from real
This prioritizing of atmosphere over the few small islands of life, along with their accompanying documents, that are piercing
narrative makes Once There Was Brasília the most demanding of enough to cut through all the supple mixing of modes.
Queirós’ films, although there is method in the all-pervading stasis Dry Ground Burning’s nominal lead is Chitara (Joana Darc), who
and hush. Aside from conjuring up the feeling of an unchanging sit- has tapped into the oil pipeline that passes under Sol Nascente, set
uation that has long since become interminable, the film’s frequent up a makeshift refinery, and is now selling the gasoline to local bike
wall of silence forms a suitable backdrop that allows the documen- gangs at prices negotiated with the not-always-implicit threat of

22
violence. She is supported in this endeavour by a whole gang of oth- If the spaces and significance Dry Ground Burning gives to music
er Black women, including her sister, Léa (Léa Alves), and Andreia makes the film reminiscent of a musical, the set-up suggests a heist
Viera, another returning face whose namesake character in the new movie (an impression that is duly borne out by the gunfight that in-
film has also set up a political party to stand up for the rights of the terrupts Chitara and Léa’s final heart-to-heart). Chitara’s historical
many in Sol Nascente who have served time. Although her make- undertaking is talked about almost as if it were a legend or fable,
shift campaign initially feels like a reiteration of that of the hap- with the fact it is said to have taken place in 2019 once again gen-
less Dildu from Is the City (right down to an early encounter with tly smudging where exactly in the present we find ourselves, while
a political rival with much greater means), it ultimately reaches a science-fiction trappings are also evident in the police vehicle that
different conclusion when it produces a cavalcade of its own, replete prowls the streets. Furthermore, the rugged landscape—a great,
with flag-waving women and pounding music. The odds may still wild, lawless expanse whose riches are up for grabs, as “civilization”
be stacked against such grassroots political action, but such move- (i.e., Brasília) has still not encroached upon it—also conjures up the
ments are growing. Western. These genres and their markers are blended together so
Alongside sustained observation of the daily tasks involved in skillfully that there is no clear delineation as to where one stops and
keeping the refinery running—including holding price negotiations the other begins, with only the sharp edges of the moments of unde-
and delivering the end product, both of which are mainly shown niable documentary able to slice through the cohesion.
bathed in the same yellow light familiar from Once There Was The first instance of this is the pro-Bolsonaro rally, which serves
Brasília—Dry Ground Burning devotes just as much attention to fol- as a timely, sobering reminder of what everything in Queirós’ films is
lowing all the other things that make up these women’s lives, with set against: a centre that still makes up a majority and may continue
the degree of staging involved left deliberately vague: friendly chit- to do so come this October’s elections, assuming the entire political
chat, family time, trips to church, or pumping parties. The parties system even holds. But, when considered in the context of the uni-
both give the film its title—one mid-tempo song tells of the beautiful verse of these films, this pales in comparison to the moment when,
women of the hood, “united in one heart, like dry ground burning” during a monologue, one of the characters suddenly references
(an image that cleverly overlaps with that of the gasoline sample Queirós himself directly for the first time since Is the City Only One?
burning after being poured onto the ground and ignited to signal and wonders how the film can continue in the way it was planned
the start of sales)—and provide one of its most memorable scenes, now that another of its characters is back in prison, with photo-
in which a busload of women bump, grind, and eventually make out. graphic evidence soon following to make the documentary face of
Here and elsewhere, Léa’s queerness is presented and lived out with this reality abundantly clear. Of all the many moments of alignment
a total matter-of-factness—most winningly in a jokey conversation between Queirós and his ever-evolving cast across his filmography,
between her and her sister about how easily they could have hooked this one reveals that such cinematic endeavours are ultimately just
up—that belies the radical gesture of its representation onscreen. as fragile as the people and situations they portray.

Once There Was Brasília

23
The Sea Inside
Helena Wittmann on Human Flowers of Flesh

BY JORDAN CRONK

Among a new generation of German filmmakers, Hamburg’s Starring Greek actress Angeliki Papoulia as Ida, a middle-aged
Helena Wittmann is uniquely elemental, even primal, in her con- woman and captain of an all-male, mixed-race boat crew, Human
cerns. For over a decade, the 39-year-old artist has been exploring Flowers unfolds in waves of slowly breaking incident and expo-
the outer reaches of cinematic storytelling through the medium’s sition. Neither dramatic nor inconsequential, these narrative
singular ability to transform not only space and time, but also the beats are instead suggestive of larger feelings and ideas which
spectator’s relationship with their surroundings. Human Flowers Wittmann frequently gives shape to via striking oceanic imagery
of Flesh, Wittmann’s follow-up to her mesmerizing feature de- and a kind of meta-materialist sense of filmic depth and texture.
but Drift (2017), pushes her formal and thematic predilections Shooting in 16mm, with the occasional intravenous-like injec-
towards a vanishing point where narrative dovetails with pure tion of images taken from under a microscope or printed as cy-
aesthetic elegance. A standout in this summer’s Locarno competi- anotypes, Wittmann (who, as a cinematographer, has lent her
tion, it marks a major step up for Wittmann in terms of profile and distinctive visual style to films by contemporaries such as Philipp
visibility, and carries with it a certain seriousness of intent that Hartmann and Luise Donschen) has fashioned a fully function-
harkens back to art cinema’s heyday of the ’60s and ’70s, when al aesthetic analogue for an otherwise elliptical narrative built
ambition and ambiguity were all but inextricable bedfellows. around the wonders of its Mediterranean setting—a distinction

24
unavailable to the digitally shot Drift. Even the stately typeface Helena Wittmann: Yes, that’s true. A friend was showing me
used for the film’s opening and closing credits speaks to a unified around Marseille one day, and we came upon this French Foreign
vision and clarity of purpose that more films of its scale should Legion recreation centre. It’s on the coast and built high up on a
strive to match. hill, so you can’t really see what’s going on inside. But seeing of-
Human Flowers moves freely between land and sea, charting a ficers coming in and out of it aroused my curiosity, I think, first,
methodical course from the shores of Marseille to the streets of because of their appearance—super-fit and trained men just walk-
Algeria, with a stopover along the bustling coast of Corsica. As the ing around have quite a presence. As I looked into it, I realized that
film opens, Ida and her crew are on leave in Marseille, where they there’s much more military presence in France than I realized—
drink and mingle with the locals by night and wander the city by much more than in Germany, for example. In Germany, for good
day. As Ida explores, she becomes intrigued by the presence of reason, the military hasn’t really been present in the interior of
the French Foreign Legion and the apocryphal stories she hears the country for a long time. So seeing these officers walking around
about its history. Seemingly drawn in by the soldiers’ expression- in public provoked a strong reaction in me, in a way I don’t think it
less demeanour, Ida is soon compelled to set off on a different kind does for French people, mainly because it’s so normal to them.
of voyage—one that, by way of the Legion, will take her deep into Two years later, once I had begun work on the film, I went back
the recesses of her subconscious, where France’s colonial past is to Marseille to see the centre again. But this was just one aspect
made manifest and the existential plight of a self-possessed wom- of the initial idea. I never set out to make a film about French le-
an becomes increasingly unmoored from present-day matters. gionnaires, or even about this encounter with them. Many differ-
A true enigma, Ida is as much a structuring presence as she is ent threads had come together for me at the time. I was shooting
an occasional absence, a character as concrete as she is elusive. Drift, so I was on the sea, and at some point I made the decision
As the boat’s newest crew member, Vladimir (Vladimir Vulevic), not to shoot the crew, or even much of the boat. You see the
says of her before they embark, “I imagine her life very free, al- boat in Drift, but it’s not really important, whereas in the new
ways in movement, fluid.” film it’s very important—it’s like a character. Also, while reading
Befitting its nautical milieu, Human Flowers doesn’t end so some books about French history I learned that in the ’30s, ’40s,
much as complete its course, with Ida arriving in the Algerian city and ’50s, men from precarious backgrounds didn’t have many ca-
of Sidi Bel Abbès, where the Legion’s headquarters was located reer choices, so they would often go to sea, to work on a boat, or
until the country gained independence in 1962. Here, Ida encoun- else would enlist in the Foreign Legion. That’s when I decided to
ters an aging ex-legionnaire played by Denis Levant—reprising research it a bit more and observe a bit more, which became
the role of Galoup he made famous in Claire Denis’ homoerotic its own inspiration, since the Legion itself is so inaccessible.
legionnaire classic Beau travail (1999)—who she follows through Through the making of the film we were able to gain a little bit of
town before crossing a literal and figurative threshold that brings access, but that’s not really visible in the film. At the beginning,
the film’s historical undercurrents to bear on the character’s in- the whole thing was super opaque.
creasingly metaphysical presence in the narrative. Scope: How did the research process take shape, and were
As she did with Michael Snow’s Wavelength (1967) in the clos- there any sources or texts that proved important?
ing moments of Drift, Wittmann directly invokes Beau travail not Wittmann: I started by just reading about the Legion online.
to preempt any visual or thematic associations one might make They have a big marketing apparatus, both to recruit people and
(and which, it should be said, she also doesn’t sidestep), but rather to preserve the myth about the Legion. My initial interest was in
to establish a framework for the film’s deft interplay of eras and what the Legion is doing today, because in my mind they were just
energies. And therein lies the distinction: where Denis concerns some organization from the past, when they were working to col-
herself with the way bodies interact with one another, Wittmann onize and keep the colonies going. But French society is still con-
is more interested in how the human body interacts with its en- nected to colonization. It’s still present—it’s the same story, in a
vironment, and how these forces can generate ripples across way. It’s just not so obviously aggressive.
time and space. In perhaps the film’s most stunning sequence, But I mostly read online histories, as well as diaries and books
the camera untethers itself from the boat and dives deep into the by legionnaires. The most important book as it relates to the his-
sea, eventually reaching an airplane wreck on the ocean floor. In torical aspects of the film is Gourrama by Friedrich Glauser, which
Human Flowers, traces of history are written across every surface, I worked into the narrative very subtly in the opening bar scene.
every landscape, in every face and in every memory. Its destina- Glauser went into the Legion, I think, in order to write about it. I
tion is not always clear, but it’s anchored at all points in something don’t think he was interested in being in the Legion per se. But he
tangible, immediate, and, above all, beautiful. experienced it—he was stationed in Morocco. He fictionalizes the
experience in the book, but it’s really interesting how he describes
the temporal aspects of the job, the waiting and suspended sense
Cinema Scope: You’ve mentioned that one of the starting of time, as well as the adopted language and homoerotic dynamic
points for this film was encountering French Foreign Legion of- amongst the legionnaires.
ficers in Marseille, and how you looked at them but they wouldn’t It’s interesting, because you could argue that other mercenary
make eye contact—something we see happen to Ida at the begin- groups like Blackwater and the Wagner Group in Russia are based
ning of the film. What else can you tell me about this experience? on ideas related to the French Foreign Legion. It’s private, but it’s

25
part of the army, so it’s state-run—ideas like that. The Legion was explaining that—what it means, etc. Suffice to say that within this
kind of like an avant-garde iteration of these structures. Glauser’s constellation of characters, she has the financial means to balance
book also describes how warfare is today, and how the different out the male presence on the boat. At one point I thought of hav-
countries interact. For me, it was a good way to find out about the ing a second female crew member, but that would have thrown off
relations between Europe and the African continent, where the that balance, and changed the entire dynamic.
Legion still has stations. Ida was partly inspired by the main character in Marguerite
Scope: How did the Ida character come about, and how did Duras’ book The Sailor from Gibraltar, which also deals with a
you initially think to place her against this larger backdrop of woman who lives on a boat with a male crew. It eventually evolves
the Legion? into a kind of love story, but that aspect didn’t interest me so
Wittmann: I think everything you see of Ida in the film—her much. I wanted Ida to be free, to not suffer, to simply follow her
decisions, her way of being—is how I personally got closer to the curiosity, and for this to be okay. Angeliki brings many layers to
various subjects. The way Ida follows these traces mirrors the the character, particularly with her face—you see experience, and
development of the film. From Marseille, I went to Corsica, and also maybe some sadness.
legionnaires were everywhere. But at the same time I was also in- Scope: As the only female crew member, how did you conceive
terested in the landscapes and the sea, but in a different way than of Ida in terms of her professional life and demeanour?
Drift. In this film I’m more interested in the sea as matter, and Wittmann: I wanted Ida to embody an independence I almost
how it enables different ways of storytelling in terms of fluidity never see in cinema. I didn’t want her circumstances to be at all
and interweaving. I thought it would be interesting if everything— determined by a man, or for her to follow anything other than her
the characters, the elements, the boat—was more equal than what own impulses. This is where Ida is different from the character
you would see in a typical movie. Ida is, of course, the protago- in Duras’ book, who ends up following a man. Ida traverses many
nist—she decides the course of the narrative and the film deals social spaces, landscapes, and, in the case of the Legion, an insti-
with her perception—but she’s not present in every frame. She’s tution. I wanted her journey, like the film, to raise questions but
not a classical figure. not offer answers, and also to be open to change at any moment—
So on the one hand she’s based on my experiences, but on the taking the sea as an example for storytelling. It’s fluid, but it dis-
other I wanted to make a very different kind of character. She solves—you never have a stable moment. Ida receives and accepts
needed to be old enough so the voyage couldn’t be read as just and then acts, but never aggressively. Her way of behaviour trans-
some trip she’s taking, but something that’s been decided upon. forms her surroundings automatically.
Also, she couldn’t be a mother. I was interested in exploring an Scope: Do you find that Ida is connected at all with Theresa
independent female figure, personally as well as financially. She’s George’s character in Drift? Among other things, they both seem
privileged, clearly, but I’m not really interested in psychologically drawn to the sea.
 Wittmann: I never thought about Human Flowers as a follow- Scope: Can you discuss your writing process, and what the
up to Drift, but, of course, yes, I do see how they might be con- script looked like compared to the finished film? There’s a fair
nected. There are certainly similarities, in the way that their sur- amount of dialogue, but hardly any of it is there to push the narra-
roundings and structures organize their time. Both characters are tive along. It’s much more anecdotal.
very much in their own time, which they have the ability to decide Wittmann: For this film all the dialogues were written ahead of
on and which is quite something. That’s why I didn’t want Ida to time. But it’s true what you say, it’s almost entirely people telling
be a mother—not because I don’t like mothers, but because kids people things: someone tells someone a story, or someone reads
automatically take away that freedom and determine your time something to someone. There is some more traditional dialogue
and responsibilities. towards the end, but it’s very minimal, very reduced. There was
Scope: If I’m not mistaken, other than Vladimir, who at one some more of this in the script, but I took these scenes out—some
point dips his feet into a pond, Ida is the only character who goes of which I really love—just because they were so different. I real-
in the water. Maybe I’m reaching, but that seems to say something ized while editing the film that I was more interested in a form
about Ida, or at least her relationship with her surroundings. of dialogue in which the characters offer something to someone.
Wittmann: That’s funny, but it’s true: she is the only one who A couple of people have described the film as “novelistic,” and I
goes in the water. I didn’t consciously set out to do that, but for think that’s probably accurate. There’s something in it that comes
me it was important that she is very connected to the water. It from literature: little stories in the film that convey experiences,
also has to do with how your perspective changes when looking at motives, images, or sounds. It’s like waves—it just comes and goes.
land from the sea. When your body is in the water, you’re in a very But it interweaves, and eventually makes a bigger picture, which
special state. Everything gets quieter. You’re more able to concen- you discover along the way.
trate, you hear your breathing—there’s just another focus. You’re Scope: Most of the crew members are of different nationalities,
more connected with yourself. I wanted that for Ida, but also to and at least five languages are spoken in the film, only some of
show different situations while she’s in the water. Sometimes she’s which are subtitled. How did this idea come about?
floating, sometimes she’s swimming like she’s trying to re-enact Wittmann: One big thing relates to the Legion: soldiers come
how a legionnaire trains. At one point Ida brings Vladimir plants from all over the world, but they find a common language.
from the ocean. That’s because he’s more connected to the land: On the sea, particularly the Mediterranean, it’s the same thing:
you see him gardening in Marseille, then walking in the forests in people from all over come and work on a boat, and they find a
Corsica. So while I didn’t really think about allowing only Ida to go common language.
in the water, I did think about Vladimir’s relationship to the land Another reason is that I had specific actors in mind for each of
and how that relates to Ida’s connection with the water. the main roles. I knew them, or knew their work, and I wrote for

27
them. In fact, they inspired the characters very much—the real Levant and I finally met, it was really nice. At the time I didn’t
people are in them. And they happen to be from different coun- speak French; now I speak a little, but back then I didn’t speak
tries: Mauro Soares is from Portugal, Vladimir is from Serbia, any, and he doesn’t speak English, so we had to kind of commu-
Gustavo Jahn is from Brazil, Ingo Martens and Steffen Danek are nicate through gestures. But he remembered the original role and
from Germany, and Ferhat Mouhali is from Algeria. Actually, in the shooting so well—he has this crazy memory. He said he had a
the film Ferhat speaks Berber, not Arabic, which, if you know physical memory of Galoup, how he would walk and move. At the
the history of Algeria, gives you a little hint about his character. end of the shoot he mentioned how interesting it was for him to
Scope: Beau travail is an obvious touchstone for the film. Can re-embody the role again.
you talk about your history with the Claire Denis movie, and how Scope: Did he mention anything about the character, or suggest
directly or indirectly you wanted Human Flowers to relate to it? anything different for the role that you hadn’t written?
Wittmann: Well, I like Beau travail a lot. I think the first time Wittmann: No. Everything in those scenes is in the script. We
I watched it was when it came out at the end of the ’90s, and I’ve played with the wording a little bit, but nothing much was changed
seen it many times since. But I don’t work in a manner where I as it concerns his character. However, I did have to change aspects
want to reference something as such. It’s similar to the Marguerite of that part of the script after learning that we wouldn’t be able to
Duras text: I quote from it because it’s something I came across shoot in Algeria. We waited a year to shoot the ending, hoping we
while writing the film, and it just so beautifully tells something. would be able to do it in Algeria, but eventually we realized, for
So why not take from it? It’s as material as other things—material political reasons, we would have to do it somewhere else, so we
from elsewhere. But I never set out to reference a specific film or began location scouting in Morocco. But by then I had edited the
make an homage, per se. rest of the film. In the first version of the script, Ida didn’t enter
That said, with Beau travail, there are different reasons I use Galoup’s apartment in the final scene. It ended with her pushing
it. For one, it was really the only reference I had for the Foreign the door open; you wouldn’t see what happened after that. It was a
Legion before making the film. I had no idea about this institution, much more open ending.
but I knew Beau travail, and I remembered the German title: Der After having met Denis, I became more aware of his physicality.
Fremdenlegionär (The Foreign Legionnaire). For me, Denis Levant I noticed as we walked around Marseille that he was always play-
in that film was like an icon of the Legion. Second, there’s some- ing around—he loves to play. So I wrote the scene in the apartment
thing in the film about the times in between, states of boredom where he juggles the eggs. He comes from the circus, and in all his
or states of being, oftentimes in the landscape; that’s something I films he’s always doing so much physically, so I just assumed he
associate with Beau travail. But I don’t think of it as a reference so could juggle. I figured if he couldn’t do it, then we’d find something
much as a set of common interests that Claire Denis and I share, else for him to do. But it was perfect: he was so precise, almost like
at least as it relates to this specific film. a professional juggler.
And then there’s the character of Galoup, who I decided to inte- Scope: When we spoke last year you mentioned that you had a
grate into my film once I knew it needed to end in Algeria, and we rough assemblage, but that you were missing an ending. I guess
would be going back in history, in a sense—back to the origin of the now, having heard that story, you were referring to the last scene,
Legion in Algeria, where their headquarters were stationed until not the final shot?
the country gained independence. The Legion built the city of Sidi Wittmann: Yeah, the final shot of the desert was clear to me
Bel Abbès, which is why it looks very European. from early on. One of the things I wanted to explore in the film was
During my research I came across many videos of French peo- the strange kinship between the sea and the desert. I had never
ple, legionnaires as well as ex-legionnaires, and people whose been to the desert, but we went to film this one shot.
families had lived in Algeria before the independence, praising Scope: The way the sand curves and the way the landscape is
Sidi Bel Abbès and its past as a kind of belle époque, or golden layered in that shot reminds me of the sea. It also acts as an inter-
age—always in reference to this colonized time when the Legion esting bookend with the opening shot of the rocks.
occupied the country. So for me to be able to pick up with Galoup Wittmann: I thought about that a lot: how to frame the open-
20 years later in Sidi Bel Abbès was a way to sort of reclaim the ing and closing shots in terms of landscape and scale. I did a lot
country and the era from this idea. When Beau travail ends you of preparation by taking analogue photos of these two locations.
don’t know what happens to Galoup, but I could image that char- Scope: Can you tell me about editing the film? Like Drift,
acter as one who would remain in this mindset and live there Human Flowers has a loose three-part structure, but it feels much
many years later. more diffuse than even that film.
Scope: How did you propose the part to Denis Levant? Did you Wittmann: It’s difficult to put it in words. In a way, the struc-
two discuss his feelings about Galoup, and was there any hesita- ture flows a bit easier than in Drift, because of the passage be-
tion on his part to revisit the character? tween locations. It’s clear, or at least chronological. But from this
Wittmann: I started by writing him a letter. I explained to him foundation of linearity I knew I wanted to layer things in an al-
the idea, about how it would be a continuation of the Galoup char- most sculptural way. The perception and rhythm of time plays a
acter, and he liked it. I think he thought it was a funny idea, but huge role. For example, in the scene that goes under the surface of
an interesting one. I guess he also mentioned it to Claire Denis, the water, even in this one shot there are multiple layers to what’s
though I don’t know what she thinks about it. But when Denis being told: there’s the depth, but then you see a plane underwater,

28
which might make you think of history. And then as the camera challenge each other. For this film we worked a lot with concrete
gets closer to the plane it transforms into another landscape, and sounds. Nika was present for the entire shoot, so she would record
you see that it’s a habitat for other species. I think in a shot like this the original sound, but also additional sounds in and around each
you need that time to get there, to be able to see it, feel it, hear it. location. With the boat, for example, we wanted it to have a voice.
These are the things that interest me in cinema: to get into And you hear it in the film—it’s very present. That was all built
these different states, and to be able to narrate in a very differ- from recordings made on the boat. Like the edit, it’s difficult to
ent way. In cinema you have the possibility to leave things out, to explain, but we think of the sound design as you would a musical
jump from one place to another, and enter different states. How composition, and, in fact, Nika contributed an original song to the
you then get into a rhythm that invites the viewer to come along is film. That’s her song in the dance scene.
a different story. For me, it’s through intuition, composition—but Scope: Going back to the final act, I’m wondering if your con-
never in a conceptual way. ception of those scenes changed once you realized you wouldn’t
Scope: Materiality plays a strong role in the film: it’s reflected be able to shoot it in Algeria?
almost symbolically in the title, but it’s also directly in the film Wittmann: I thought about how to approach it for a very long
through the use of microscope images, and later when the image is time. Once I knew we couldn’t shoot in Algeria I began to think
printed as cyanotype. How did you come to these techniques and about it differently, because the reality of the situation was not
this idea to build the film around these material qualities? without context. The fact that we couldn’t go to Algeria relates di-
Wittmann: It’s rooted in certain ideas I had to leave out of rectly to the history we implicitly depict in the film. So I did think
Drift. One thing that interests me about the sea is the fact that it’s about changing the ending, but it just didn’t make any sense. It
matter, but it transgresses borders. And we’re part of it: salt water took a while, but I’m really happy with the location we found in
is inside the body. Having come to this idea, it was logical for me Morocco, and I think the fact that the making of the film also tells
to integrate it into the filmmaking process itself. For example, the a story is interesting.
cyanotypes—it’s a pretty simple chemical process, but it required Scope: To that end, did your conception of the Legion, or an-
work to figure out how to put it on blank film. You have to do it ything related to these characters or landscapes, change at all
frame by frame. It took me almost a year of experimenting, and while making the film? I get the sense that you make films not to
then figuring out how to make these images work in relation to the tell stories, but to experience something through your subjects
regular images, since they behave so differently, was a challenge. or the filmmaking process that otherwise wouldn’t be available
But like the microscope imagery, which to me looks almost cosmic to you.
on film, I wanted to use it because I was interested in matter being Wittmann: I think you’re right. I’ve never made a film just to
part of the storytelling—that it’s not only about something, but it make a film. When I make a film, I go in with many questions. I
is that something. In the case of cinema, the medium itself is mat- love to create situations in order to live them and transform them,
ter: filmmaking is a chemical process. Putting all of this together and then transform them again before bringing them forth as cin-
was a way for me to challenge borders. ema. That’s why it’s difficult for me to talk about this film right
Scope: How has your work with your sound designer Nika now, because it’s so new—it’s in a super-fragile state.
Son developed over the years, and how did you come to the film’s As for the Legion, I have my political position towards militari-
unique aural construction? It’s a quiet film, but it’s busy with the zation, and that didn’t change. But I did have interactions with le-
sounds of creaking ropes and other nautical details. gionnaires that changed my perspective. As soon as you look clos-
Wittmann: Nika and I have been working together for 13 years. er, things become more complicated. It’s easy to categorize things,
She’s a musician. She works with sound the way I work with imag- but you have to somehow maintain a distance while remaining
es. For us, the relationship between image and sound is important, open. Sometimes, it’s more difficult to describe things the closer
but we have different perspectives and abilities. We always try to you get to them.
 PACIFICTION
BENOÎT MAGIMEL

A film by ALBERT SERRA

PACIFICTION A FILM BY ALBERT SERRA WITH BENOÎT MAGIMEL PAHOA MAHAGAFANAU MARC SUSINI MATAHI PAMBRUN ALEXANDRE MELO SERGI LÓPEZ MONTSE TRIOLA MICHAEL
VAUTOR CÉCILE GUILBERT LLUÍS SERRAT MIKE LANDSCAPE CYRUS ARAI MAREVA WONG BAPTISTE PINTEAUX PRODUCED BY PIERRE-OLIVIER BARDET ALBERT SERRA MONTSE
TRIOLA DIRK DECKER ANDREA SCHÜTTE JOAQUIM SAPINHO MARTA ALVES LAURENT JACQUEMIN IMAGE ARTUR TORT SOUND JORDI RIBAS BENJAMIN LAURENT BRUNO TARRIÈRE
EDITING ALBERT SERRA ARTUR TORT ARIADNA RIBAS MUSIC MARC VERDAGUER JOE ROBINSON SET DESIGN SEBASTIAN VOGLER COSTUMES PRÁXEDES DE VILALLONGA A PRODUCTION BY IDÉALE
AUDIENCE GROUP ANDERGRAUN FILMS TAMTAM FILM ROSA FILMES IN COPRODUCTION WITH ARTE FRANCE CINÉMA BAYERISCHER RUNDFUNK ARCHIPEL PRODUCTION WITH THE PARTICIPATION
OF ARTE FRANCE CINÉ + ARTE RADIOTELEVISIÓN ESPAÑOLA TELEVISIÓ DE CATALUNYA RTP IN ASSOCIATION WITH CINÉMAGE 16 WITH THE SUPPORT OF POLYNÉSIE FRANÇAISE THE RÉGION
PROVENCE-ALPES-CÔTE D'AZUR IN PARTNERSHIP WITH CNC ICAA-INSTITUTO DE LA CINEMATOGRAFÍA Y DE LAS ARTES AUDIOVISUALES ICEC-INSTITUT CATALÀ DE LES EMPRESES
CULTURALS MOIN FILMFUND HAMBURG SCHLESWIG-HOLSTEIN CNC-ICA FRENCH PORTUGUESE FUND FUNDO DE APOIO AO TURISMO E AO CINEMA CNC AVANCE SUR RECETTE
WITH THE SUPPORT OF FILMS BOUTIQUE SOTHEBY'S PORTUGAL LES FILMS DU LOSANGE – FRENCH DISTRIBUTION LES FILMS DU LOSANGE – INTERNATIONAL SALES FILMS BOUTIQUE
 Satan’s Limbo
Alexander Sokurov’s Fairytale

BY MICHAEL SICINSKI

Film festival politics being what they are, many were surprised when Cannes directorate cancelled the session. Did this situation surprise
Alexander Sokurov’s new feature, Fairytale, was announced as pre- me? Well, no. My previous work, Francofonia [2015], has the same
miering in competition at Locarno. Sokurov, the grand old master fate in Cannes...It’s a strange place. At least now I know for sure I
of Russian cinema, has had numerous films debut in competition at am very disliked in Cannes. First, as a director, then as a Russian…
Berlin, Cannes, and Venice. In 2011, he even took the Golden Lion for Or vice versa?”
Faust, easily one of his most grotesque and unwatchable films. Point Despite Sokurov’s hurt feelings, the Cannes pass on Fairytale
being, if Sokurov was screening in Locarno (which, incidentally, was was probably nothing personal. After all, there had been open dis-
the first Western festival to premiere his work, with The Lonely Voice cussion about whether festivals should accept Russian films at all
of Man [1987]), chances are good that the other festivals took a pass following the country’s brutal invasion of Ukraine in February.
on his latest. While Putin’s deadly machismo and tyrannical rule are hardly
This, in turn, raised more direct questions about the relationship in question, the West has been at a loss for how to respond to the
between film festivals and “politics” in the more general sense. In invasion, since, despite supplying weapons to the Ukrainian mili-
Screen, Sokurov claimed that Cannes invited and then uninvited tary, NATO does not want to go toe-to-toe with Russia. Hamstrung
Fairytale with little advance notice.“It seems to me that Cannes was liberal elites have satisfied themselves for the moment with pure-
afraid of Fairytale,” he claims. “A few hours before the screening, the ly symbolic gestures (flying the Ukrainian blue-and-yellow from

31
rooftops and shop windows) and a few economic ones (dasvidani- Fairytale combines hazy, pen-and-ink landscapes and edifices
ya, Starbucks!) that won’t amount to much in the long run. So, even with patched-in photographic images of Sokurov’s fearsome four-
though Cannes decided to place one Russian film in competition— some, taken from decades of official state footage. Within this en-
Kiril Serebrennikov’s uncharacteristically soapy Tchaikovsky’s vironment, Sokurov has staged a kind of Beckettian limbo for these
Wife—most festivals established a semi-official no-fly zone, and titanic leaders and despots of the 20th century, with some of his fa-
those festivals that haven’t, such as Karlovy Vary, have been round- voured subjects from previous films (Hitler, Stalin) rubbing shoul-
ly criticized by representatives of the Ukrainian film industry. ders with newer cast members (Churchill, Mussolini, Napoleon,
As for Fairytale, both TIFF and NYFF took a pass. (Neither fes- and Christ). Inasmuch as Fairytale received a reception following
tival is showing a single Russian film.) But it’s foolish to assert that its Locarno debut, it has mostly focused on Sokurov’s application
global events have completely determined the fate of Sokurov’s lat- of deepfake imaging technology. Using available images of the vari-
est. There’s just no getting around the fact that Fairytale is a weird- ous dead heads of state, Sokurov moves them around in his digitized
ass film—different from anything Sokurov has made to date, and hellscape, manipulating their faces and mouths so they appear to
very out of step with the contemporary scene. The elements that speak the lines of his script.
make it compelling to some (myself included) will make it just as off- While this use of cutting-edge computer work is certainly impres-
putting to others. As Jørgen Leth might say, Sokurov has made a sive from a veteran, 71-year-old director, to call Fairytale a “deep-
“shit cartoon,” centred on the dazed musings of at least three of the fake film” is misleading. Sokurov hasn’t produced anything at all
20th century’s biggest pieces of shit. This is, indeed, Sokurov’s dig- like those creepy-clownish Tom Cruise impersonations on TikTok:
itally rendered featurette about Hitler, Stalin, Mussolini, and (for instead, there is limited movement in these figures, and the digitized
good measure) Churchill meandering through a grisaille purgatory, faces seem to bubble up from another dimension. The mouth move-
waiting to see if the Big Guy hears them knocking on heaven’s door. ments in this film are really more like the old Clutch Cargo cartoons
Sokurov is a director typically perceived as having a distinctive from the late ’50s, with an obvious disconnect between lips and faces
style—a brand, even—that is thought of as being ponderous, grim, and that generates an impression more uncanny than realistic. This is in
even a bit self-important. But while this may be the case for a num- keeping with the unexplained proliferation of multiples in Fairytale,
ber of his films, Sokurov actually has a lot of variety in his filmogra- with Hitler or Churchill walking around with so-called “brothers.”
phy. Spiritual Voices (1995), to take one example, is indeed slow and The temporal dislocation of words and bodies, and the endless di-
serious, but it is also a landmark work of video art, a piece that uses vision of identities, work in tandem with Sokurov’s repetitive dia-
the particular technical aspects of analogue video for a smeary, nar- logue and narrative stasis to limn a netherworld that exists outside
cotic effect. Other Sokurov works, including some of his best-known of time and teleology. The only obvious allusions to the present day
films—Russian Ark (2002), The Sun (2005), and Alexandra (2007)— come from Churchill, who makes several phone calls to Buckingham
employ innovative camerawork, unexpected tonal shifts, and even a Palace, assuring Queen Elizabeth II that he and the others are anx-
fair bit of humour. In other words, not everything the man makes is iously awaiting her arrival.
like getting an eyeball full of iron slag (which is how I once described As to the broader themes of Fairytale, they are fairly self-evident,
watching The Second Circle [1990]). much like the children’s stories alluded to by the title. The past is
So the fact that Fairytale is essentially a work of animation should more than another country for Sokurov—it’s a suspension in formal-
not be entirely surprising. Going back at least to Mother and Son dehyde, a non-linear pageant of dead souls struggling to adjust to the
(1997), which is still arguably his finest film, Sokurov has expressed powerlessness of eternity. Each of the leaders pleads in turn to be let
interest in combining classical aesthetics with the flatness of mod- through the gates of Heaven (a conceit that recalls Kafka’s “Before
ernism, treating the image as fundamentally plastic but still trying the Law”), but it is ultimately unclear whether Heaven, Limbo, and
to achieve the sublime. (Suitably, Mother and Son often looks like a Hell are separate places or just vague attitudes that shift around
Caspar David Friedrich painting as staged and filmed by Stan Brakhage.) these men like weather conditions.
In sculpting his haptic vision of the boundary between heaven and It should be noted that the placement of Churchill alongside three
hell, Sokurov has made as sharp a turn into avant-garde territory as verified dictators has raised a few eyebrows. We certainly know of
Kiarostami’s 24 Frames (2017) or Godard’s turn to digital collage. his colonialist exploits, and at one point in Fairytale the former PM
While Fairytale isn’t nearly as successful as those artists’ works, it laments the “problem of Africa,” but Sokurov hasn’t exactly become
is much more than a lateral move. In its visual style, rhythms, and at- woke: he has stated that his selection of subjects derived from an
emporal drift, Fairytale very much resembles the work of American article in a Russian newspaper that cited the four men as the most
animator Lawrence Jordan, best known for films like Gymnopedies influential architects of modern geopolitics. One could certainly
(1965) and Our Lady of the Sphere (1968). Like the collage-novels of quibble with this—Mussolini’s legacy seems negligible compared to,
Max Ernst, Jordan uses the raw material of printed ink drawings, say, Ataturk’s—but it does offer a sense that the director’s views on
mostly from turn-of-the-century “penny dreadfuls,” to produce a the exercise of total power have evolved.
universe suspended between representation and abstraction. His Still, the film reiterates Sokurov’s longtime obsessions, suggest-
more recent work, such as Beyond Enchantment (2010) and Solar ing that he, too, is trapped in an amorphous historical fog. As one
Sight (2011), shares with Fairytale an attenuation of time and atten- watches Fairytale, it is difficult not to get edgy, even impatient. Why
tion, only amplified by how resolutely anti-modern these works are exactly did Sokurov decide to delve yet again into the dictatorial
compared with the larger universe of contemporary filmmaking. unconscious, when he probably got the job done much more effec-

32
tively in Moloch (1999) and Taurus (2001)? Is moving forward on Despite this treatment, Sokurov’s jabs at Putin from the centre-
the technical front an adequate advance? And more to the point, why right were never likely to impress anyone, and the invasion of
would Sokurov choose to make Fairytale now? While he is under no Ukraine only makes his parliamentary grievances seem blinkered
obligation to take direct aim at Putin (which would be suicide, even at best. Then again, these may be the only criticisms possible to lev-
for as high-profile an artist as he is), there’s a sense that relitigating el against Putin without ending up, as they say, under the prison.
the 20th century is Sokurov’s way of avoiding facing the 21st. Fairytale looks a lot like an academic exercise, but it also strongly
Furthermore, Sokurov is no radical. He was once somewhat suggests that time has either stopped, or folded in on itself in a per-
close to Putin (around the time of Faust—no commentary need- manent ideological miasma: tyrants multiply and divide, appearing
ed), and his remarks on the North Caucasus are almost outright and fading, and only the faces change.
Islamophobic, even as he insists that the region should be free to In the closest thing Fairytale offers to a narrative climax, the
break away from Russia. That said, he has been more and more multiple iterations of the four leaders find themselves atop a
vocal in his opposition to Putin’s assault on democracy, even go- colossal Romanesque ruin, an Albert Speer edifice with exposed
ing so far as disbanding his Example of Intonation film academy plumbing and a crumbling grandstand. From here, the men ad-
(which nurtured both Kantemir Balagov and Kira Kovalenko), cit- dress “the people,” a swarming gray mass that roils like an ocean
ing funding cuts and political harassment. And, at the end of last made from heads and bodies. It looks like a charcoal drawing by
year, he went on record stating that Putin was fomenting a “consti- William Kentridge, an undulating herd of bodies indistinguish-
tutional crisis” and that ethnic diversity was vital to Russia’s “basic able from the great abyss. This mass serves as the quartet’s last
republican foundations.” Subsequently, Sokurov was detained at temptation, their final taste of earthly stature, and it appears they
the Finnish border, prevented from leaving Russia to attend an ac- may spend eternity vainly appealing to this collective body, trying
ademic conference in Milan. (According to the Moscow Times, rep- to hold sway in a place that is beyond power or ambition. Sokurov
resentatives of the Russian embassy in Finland chalked the affair up leaves it at that, knowing that in the end there is no Heaven or
to “COVID protocols.”) Hell, only history.

33
Timely Circumstances
Cyril Schäublin on Unrest
BY JAY KUEHNER

Anarchic in spirit but formally composed, Cyril Schäublin’s loupe-sighted workers—mostly women—bent fastidiously over
Unrest operates in the dialectical fashion fitting of its era, ar- the mechanical marvel that is horlogerie.
riving at an unsuspecting synthesis between such notionally The film homes in with exacting detail on the intricate fab-
oppositional forces. Indeed, its radical gesture may lie in the rication of watches, identifying the eponymous piece known
refusal to situate them as mutually incompatible. A portrait of as the unrueh (unrest, or balance wheel), the regulating device
the small Swiss town of Saint-Imier, where watchmaking had at the heart of the timepiece. The film’s protagonist, a role far
become industrialized as factory labour, the film charts the less precisely defined, is a young fitter named Josephine (Clara
consequent rise of anti-authoritarian sentiment that took hold Gostynski), who has grown weary from the devaluation of her
in the region in the latter half of the 19th century. Schäublin labour (the clink of fewer centimes meted out in buttoned en-
consolidates such a sweeping historical purview within the far velopes) and is predisposed towards an increasingly organized
narrower confines of the factory itself, observing the labour of anarchist union among watchmakers, which offers healthcare

34
to unwed women. The movement has likewise sparked the sym- to council member of Bern. It’s worth noting that voting is con-
pathies of a young Russian cartographer, Pyotr (Alexei Evstratov), ducted with utmost civility, the workers’ committee having re-
newly arrived in the village to ostensibly map the shifting politi- solved to cast theirs on behalf of “the Commune,” with their own
cal territories. The film occasions the chance encounter between party differences typically settled by a majority of raised hands at
these two strangers, drawn together in a political and possibly the local pub, over glasses of absinthe. But they too are not averse
romantic alliance, which is delineated with a tender restraint un- to money, if only to send a percentage of their wages to striking
becoming of its milieu. railway workers in Baltimore, via telegram.
That Pyotr, subject of much speculation among a coterie of While such nominal content is ripe for social realist treatment,
female cousins back in Moscow in the film’s prelude, is modelled Unrest is more equivocal in its design, depicting certain human
on the Russian nobleman-turned-anarchist Pyotr Kropotkin gestures with the transactional economy of Bresson and mechan-
grounds the film in historical precedent, but Schäublin eschews ical ones “operationally,” à la Farocki. But the prevailing sense is
mere hagiography. Kropotkin the man was a far-ranging polymath that of a folktale, mythic in scope, as Schäublin is keen to resist the
and traveller (whom Oscar Wilde once dubbed the “white Christ”) verisimilitude of the period piece. Lending to its storied nature is
whose work in evolutionary biology had profound implications on the persistent reminder of its status as a photographed object,
the social sciences, and thus politics. This derived mainly from his the relative action interrupted or circumscribed by the presence
observation in nature of a common and persistent form of mutu- of camera crews documenting select versions of the “real,” to be
al aid in all species: cooperation, rather than conflict, was key to used as factory promotional material (or, in the case of one en-
survival. In this context, the benefits of self-government—of au- terprising local, selling portraits of fashionable anarchists). The
tonomous over centralized, and thus authoritarian, rule—were implication is that of exposing various myths-in-the-making in
incontrovertible: anarchy, the thinking went, did not necessarily the instant before their solidification as arbitrary truth, with cap-
entail entropy. italism being the most onerous example.
As he is conceived in the film, Kropotkin cuts a far more modest Unrest can be read less as cautionary allegory than as part of a
figure, imagined from a perspective of near-anonymity, straying continuum, inseparable from our modern crises. Lessons in the
almost haphazardly into the frame (and thus, history). Implied theory of labour value have not lost resonance, though it may be
in Schäublin’s more humble determination is a democratized, a foregone paradox that the watchmakers’ performance of work
and often decentred, view of his subjects. Historical events are is being punitively measured by the very tool they are creating
scarcely mundane, but how, his schema would appear to inquire, (their tactical response: deliberately slowing production). Unrest
is the quotidian historicized? Kropotkin, wearing a beard, round contemplates time to reveal, like that old truism of cinema, the
spectacles, and top hat, arrives unceremoniously at Saint-Imier, extent to which we are contemplated by it, constructed through
hemmed into the frame by compositions that privilege the eaves it. Within the film, distances are insistently measured to find the
of buildings and trunks of trees as much as persons. Drained of most efficient route between workstations, that time might be
drama, the dialogue is almost purely expository, but nonetheless maximized for the most expedient production. It’s only fitting
iterates a particular materiality of the historical moment, with that Unrest should afford Pyotr and Josephine the time to embark
characters meeting the grand ideas of the “long century” as if for on a Walseresque walk, with a timepiece left to dangle from the
the first time. “We imagine a territory as the area of a state or na- limb of a tree, where it might better be forgotten, or balanced to
tion” says one nonplussed Muscovite, “but for anarchists, it’s just the rhythm of nature, unkept.
a place that we live in together at any moment.”
Such pronouncements run the risk of a certain didacticism, or,
worse, of reducing characters to ciphers. But Unrest’s deployment Cinema Scope: Given the film’s opening citation—in which
of its non-professional cast lends the cerebrally droll proceedings Kroptokin concedes he is an anarchist after spending time among
an errant charm, with Schäublin effectively tasking his players the Swiss watchmakers—it is only natural that I begin with the
to embody historically weighted material with respectful insou- Russian scientist, explorer, historian, political scientist, convict,
ciance. The director’s personal investment, too, of honouring his and former prince. Kropotkin is far from a household name, and
own ancestral lineage of watchmakers, serves to animate the la- yet in his time he was something of an international celebrity
bour-oriented scenes, which are mesmeric in their rhythm and thinker. While avoiding the trap of the dreaded historical biopic,
focus. And, despite the absence of any conspicuous conflict (to your film gets at something of his essence. Was he a point of origin
wit, these anarchists have a choir), the tale is not without incident for the film? Or did it start with the watch?
nor sufficient dread. Industrialization and globalization are radi- Cyril Schäublin: It was a case of many things coming together,
cally transforming how this community organizes itself, and thus as always. It really started with my grandmother and great-aunts,
it begins to divide along economic and ideological lines, while whose stories I learned several years ago. I knew that they had
leaving us nostalgic for such a nascent schism; even the gen- worked in watch factories, but I wanted to know more about their
darmes are polite. daily lives, and what they were actually doing, and how they got
The spectre of nationalism (or “imagined communities,” as per through their days. And I learned that they were working on the
Benedict Anderson) is ushered in amid such collective uncertain- same piece, the unrest mechanism, and this singular detail reso-
ty, while a local election threatens to promote the factory owner nated with me.

35
 My brother, who is an anthropologist, told me about Kropotkin. women in my family, or the women watchmakers at the factory
Alexei Evstratov, who plays Kropotkin in the film, said something in general?
interesting to me after the shoot: that his character didn’t get the I came across other books and thinkers that influenced the film
chance to speak that much. He’s an avid reader of Kropotkin, but and were more important than Kropotkin, such as Simone Weil…
even though he was not entitled to speak from Kropotkin’s per- Scope: She worked in a metal factory, no?
spective, to try to speak his mind, he understood that there was Schäublin: Yes, in steel. Her book La condition ouvrière is sem-
some spirit of him in the film—for instance, in the way that people inal, and became critical to the film’s conception, along with my
were organizing together and exchanging knowledge. This was re- exchanges with my great-aunts. It’s good that Kropotkin is in the
ally instructive for me. film, and, of course, I really like him and what he has written, but
I’ve had these mental panics about making a biopic about he becomes, in a sense, just as marginalized as the others in the film.
Kropotkin. It’s too obvious: let’s make a film about Kropotkin the Scope: Perhaps the messenger is less important than the mes-
traveller, his life stories, and so forth. But the more I read about the sage: this idea of mutual aid so central to Kropotkin’s thinking is
anarchist movement among watchmakers in Switzerland, which manifest in the film. Reciprocity and cooperation appear to be
Kropotkin describes in his memoirs, I felt that from an anarchist something he keenly observes in nature, especially among ani-
perspective, from the 1870s and 1880s it was questionable wheth- mals in Siberia, in contrast to Darwin’s notion of natural selection.
er someone like Kropotkin, Bakunin, or Emma Goldman should Schäublin: I think this notion of mutual aid is not necessarily
have such an imposing impact, with such an historical investment in contrast to Darwin, because he was also aware of mutual aid
in their names, at the expense of more common people. What be- systems. But it gets obscured by the reception of his work, so fo-
came increasingly important to me was what was happening in cused on conflict and struggle among species and not on coopera-
the more marginal spaces at the time. For instance, outside of the tion as conducive to survival. So ideas of mutual aid are not anti-
factory among workers, on a break, or in the workshop, sharing thetical per se, but rather given more legitimacy from Kropotkin’s
ideas. It was about the more random situations of history rather observations of nature: birds helping each other feed, herds of elk
than the importance of any one biographical figure, a man, in the protecting their own, and even in ancient architectural systems or
19th century. The more I spoke with historians it became evident non-capitalized rituals, for example the gathering of wood for vil-
that it was much easier to recreate the biographies of famous men, lages to be shared among inhabitants.
such as Kropotkin or the Swiss Adhémar Schwitzguébel, who is He endeavoured to recognize many systems of mutual aid, of
included in the film, than the texture of their so-called biographi- cooperation, and I think this is reflective of a certain frame of
cal lives. What could we meaningfully construct within a film, and mind. I’m interested in this sensibility, a certain orientation of
bring a certain reality to bear on it, such as the experiences of the thought. Do we focus on conflict, struggle, and violence, or look

36
at more cooperative and beneficial instincts? It was important to Scope: Can you elaborate on the role of women in the facto-
take this into consideration in the making of the film, of what our ry? I’m curious about this heterogeneous mode of production.
orientation would be. Because the watch had so many components, each unique, the
Scope: Yes, it seems to be less about a narrative arc than a story workforce could not be reduced to singular labour, but instead was
about how this cooperation is played out, both socially and in the constituent. Was this conducive to a certain mode of resistance?
context of labour. Your invocation of Weil brings into the equa- Schäublin: It’s complex, but perhaps the other way around.
tion the subjective experience of labour—how it is lived. On the Women were part of a centralized labour force in the watch indus-
one hand there is this attempt to measure time as if it were ob- try, especially in the US, who were the biggest competitors of the
jective—indeed, in the film there are four different “versions” of Swiss. By dividing the specific mechanical labour, by introducing
time, all competing—and on the other hand there is the subjective singular modes of operation, it favoured diminished compensation:
experience of it. How did you track between these? factories could be more competitive by paying women lower wages.
Schäublin: With Weil there is this idea of cadence, the line be- Scope: And how did you achieve such incredible detail in the
tween your own rhythm and that of a machine. There is a literal shooting of the watchmaking process? It is so intimate, in con-
and symbolic construction of time, and at its heart is this barely trast to the way you shoot your characters, at such a remove.
perceptible mechanism inside the watch. When I spoke with my Schäublin: It goes back to this notion of what can we demon-
uncle, who is an advanced mechanic and knows the inner work- strably show in a movie—how to transport the lives of these peo-
ings of the watch, I asked, rather naïvely: “What is time?” He ple working in a factory, especially women, because they were so
looked at me somewhat confused and asked back: “What do you underrepresented, unable to vote, unable to participate in public
mean?” So we don’t have a shared definition of time, we don’t col- life. We don’t know exactly what that was like, but we do know
lectively know what time is, it’s still a mystery. But he said how the what they did. Clara, who plays Josephine—there are no real ac-
watch works is a series of events. It is a tic and a toc. By building tors in the film, just friends of mine or watchmakers I met—is
off a series of events, you can compare other events, and through from the canton of Bern and speaks the dialect. She’s an architect
this relation you can begin to count. From this point of view, the by trade, but she studied with a real watchmaker to prepare for the
first watch that people created was really language, for example, film. As for the recording of the micro shots, we used hand dou-
by distinguishing today and tomorrow. It’s a form of temporal or- bles of actual watchmakers, women working today from schools
ganization. A series of events juxtaposed with another series of in Switzerland where you still have to be able to take apart a watch
events. This connects with storytelling: how do we sequence nar- from the 19th century. Again, we could not create biographies of
ratives together, in a way that is meaningful? Still, time as measur- these women, but we could reproduce their work, what they did
able persists as a complete construct. From the late 19th century, for 12 hours a day.
there was an industrialization of time that became inseparable We spent three days shooting only these close-ups of the watch
from consciousness. It was hard to simply “jump out of it.” mechanics. Of course, in Switzerland we have had so many com-
In Europe now, many people say that capitalism has become mercials about watches, ever since the inception of cinema. I’ve
so concrete, so real, that it’s hard to imagine anything else. That watched far too many. The ones from the ’40s are great, but the
was one of my hopes with the movie, to show that time too is modern ones are disturbing. It was important to try to get away
constructed—which is why, as you mentioned, there are several from this commercial, recognizable style, but we had to use the
official versions of time in the film, each dependent on a specific same digital cameras that watchmakers use today, which have in
industry: factory, municipality, telegraph, and railway. I wanted some cases replaced the work of the hand, basically robotics. In
to show that there are historical constructs, or fictions, in society order to shoot the hands-on close-ups, we had to employ these
that we abide by and take as natural. The ways in which we organ- specific lenses.
ize ourselves—our economies, our societies—can be reimagined. Scope: The framing of landscapes and people is uncanny, the
There are alternatives, other mechanics. compositions seemingly oblique upon first viewing. It’s a stylis-
Scope: One of the film’s merits is the way it illuminates other tic choice that was already in place in your debut, Those Who Are
possibilities; perhaps it could have gone differently since 1870? Fine (2017). Have you developed a particular grammar with Silvan
There is also this playful gag in the film involving the photograph- Hillmann, your cinematographer?
ic crew shooting promotional material for the factory, in which Schäublin: It may be difficult to explain, because it is intuitive,
subjects are constantly reprimanded for straying into the frame. and goes a long way back, I suppose. It has to do with finding some
It’s a reminder that photography too was another nascent indus- comfort in images, just as when I draw or take photographs. There
trial and artistic development, and it too is a kind of time-keeping is a certain way of looking that needs to be honoured. When I was
machine. It could be an autocritique of the film itself. studying in Beijing, before the Olympic games, and then in Berlin
Schäublin: Yes, it raises questions about a certain authorship, before coming back to Switzerland, I was observing cities in all their
of who has the agency to take photographs of this town and its contradictions. I think the word you used might describe the sensa-
people, and present it as a kind of objective reality. Who had the tion: uncanny. It was not a deliberate thing on my part, but rather
means to construct this particular reality, the stories that people a certain way of reconciling myself to my surroundings. I’m inter-
took for real during this time? So often it was the government, or ested in these strange and marginal places, especially as they are
the state, the nation. juxtaposed with other seemingly more important things. I’m also

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attuned to certain patterns of speech when I’m an outsider, which of persiflage on the idea of romance, or the idea of romance in
was important when working on a somewhat historical film. movies. But this phrase of Rimbaud’s—that love must be rein-
Scope: This way of shooting is not intended as a kind of vented—is hinted at in this inconclusive ending. It suggests other
Brechtian distancing device? stories, other possibilities beyond the known. And this unspoken
Schäublin: It’s not purely Brechtian, but I like what he implies romance also returns to the idea of mutual aid. How do we orient
with this idea that when we are looking at an image, we are aware our hearts and minds toward greater possibility? The portraits of
of it as such, it is fabricated. We need this notion more than ever, these “lovers” transcends that of mere object or price; hopefully it
which goes hand in hand with how we understand history. What goes beyond that.
we’ve been told about the past demands interrogation. But I don’t Scope: The film is rather becalmed, given its political attention
want to be severe about it, like when watching a play you must be to issues of labour, self-government, nationalism, and the hazards
aware of its performative status and so on. What’s compelling is of capitalism. And there is very little explicit violence, although
the reality of the people inside of the construction. Their move- one could argue that it is full of structural violence. These are all
ment is real, they are not lifeless. pressing issues of our day. How did you conceive of the film in re-
Scope: To humanize them… lation to the global moment?
Schäublin: Well, we don’t need to humanize them, because Schäublin: For one, my hope is that the concept of “nation” is
they are already human. They are not hardened, they are delicate. unmasked. I don’t think that this idea needs to be made explicit
With Unrest I wanted to bring people together and recreate a his- through the film: it’s one that is commonly shared among many
torical scenario with them. We so often fall into a calculated plan, people. These prevailing concepts that were created in the time
systematized living, but we are foremost physical bodies. In the when the film is set simply won’t make sense any longer. Our re-
film there is so much devotion to the mechanical elements, but lation to money, for instance, cannot be sustained. The film does
there is also the rhythm of untold heartbeats at work. A certain not have to task itself with saying this; it is self-evident. The 1870s
amount of formal distancing can draw this out by contrast. The was a time when new technologies were having a massive impact
image is an attempt to get an overview of these incongruities, and on so many levels, among so much of the population, and this
the character is a real person responding to that environment. is also what is happening now. How is the future shaped by our
Scope: This depersonalization, combined with transactional faith in such tools? In the film, it is a question of whether we re-
dialogue, also disguises an implicit love story. It’s more potent for enact a medieval battle or, on the other hand, simulate the Paris
being so unseen! Commune? I think this is the critical question now: how do we
Schäublin: In the end, when their photographs are being sold, chart our history? How do we reimagine a truer solidarity? Maybe
or when the watch is hung in the woods, it could be seen as a kind the film allows us to imagine other possibilities.

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Myths of New England
On Michael Roemer’s Vengeance Is Mine

BY LAWRENCE GARCIA

In 1969, following the critical success of Nothing But a Man (1964), courtesy of The Film Desk, providing yet another occasion to re-
still his best-known film to date, Michael Roemer made The Plot discover Roemer’s small but forceful body of work. (The film’s last
Against Harry. Centred on Harry Plotnick (Martin Priest), a small- notable showing, under the former title, was during a retrospective
time racketeer who attempts to rehabilitate himself in the Jewish at New York’s Film Forum in 2014.) “I’m slightly out of sync with my
community after a stint behind bars, the film is a shimmering sat- own time,” the filmmaker told The New York Times in 2004. So he
ire that balances a scrupulously researched portrayal of its mi- is—the past, it seems, will not let him alone.
lieu with a rollicking, carnivalesque atmosphere. The trouble with In the case of Vengeance Is Mine this is entirely appropriate, since
Harry, though, was that when it first screened for audiences, no one the film is very much a ghost story, filled with talk of haunted pasts
laughed. The project was then shelved indefinitely until, in 1989, a and populated by characters who move like spectres through an airy,
combination of accident and initiative led Roemer to strike a new transparent world. Indeed, the film begins, as so many ghost stories
35mm print of the film and submit it to various festivals. It was sub- do, with a homecoming. When first introduced, Jo (Brooke Adams)
sequently selected for the New York Film Festival—giving the direc- is on a plane to Providence, Rhode Island with a vacant, faraway
tor his second main slate selection after Nothing But a Man—and look in her eye. Disembarking at the airport, she is met by her
was shown out of competition in Cannes a year later. adopted sister Fran (Audry Matson), and through their conversa-
This tale of rediscovery is ubiquitous in accounts of Roemer’s ca- tion it becomes clear that the question is not whether Jo is haunted,
reer, and now the story seems to be repeating itself. His 1984 film but by whom.
Vengeance Is Mine, originally broadcast on PBS’ American Playhouse We soon learn of the first of her ghosts: a child she had at 16, whom
under the title Haunted, is currently receiving a theatrical release she was forced to give up. When she returns with Fran to her child-

39
hood home, we feel we have met another: Jo’s foster mother, who two dead servants are haunting her two young wards, but also that
was responsible for giving away the child and who is now in the the children are aware of the ghosts; although she evidently cares
last stages of a terminal illness. And we meet still a third when her for the children, so intent is she on proving her theory that the sto-
ex-husband Steve (Mark Arnott) rolls into town unexpectedly, at- ry ends with her apparent justification, and a dead child. Similarly,
tempting to forcibly take her back. in Vengeance Jo becomes convinced that Donna will eventually kill
Significant as these relationships are, however, they soon recede Jackie, while Donna in turn believes that Jo wants her dead. As the
into the background as Jo is drawn into the orbit of a different fam- film wears on, Donna’s conviction becomes just as plausible as Jo’s,
ily drama, centred on a young girl, Jackie (Ari Meyers), whom she and we begin to wonder whether Jo is not in fact being taken over by
befriends during her visit, saying that she reminds her of the child the evil she is trying to resist.
she wasn’t able to keep. In a few weeks, Jackie’s father, Tom (Jon The second correlation between James and Roemer has to do with
DeVries), is to take her with him to Pittsburgh, away from her moth- their respective relationships to realism. That James emerged from
er Donna (Trish Van Devere). One day with the family at Donna’s the tradition of 19th-century realists and naturalists has, for some
beach house in Block Island is enough to convince Jo that Donna is critics, been difficult to square with the otherworldly atmospheres of
not only mentally disturbed, but also an active danger to her daugh- stories like “The Altar of the Dead” and “The Bench of Desolation,”
ter. When Jo subsequently distances herself from Donna, the latter which seem to exist on a plane between life and death where notions
lashes out, predicting that Jo will become involved with Tom and ef- of “realism” seem utterly irrelevant. Likewise, it may initially seem
fectively take her place in the family. Jo, for her part, becomes fearful hard to reconcile Vengeance with Roemer’s documentary impulses—
for Jackie’s safety, and postpones her intended departure to stay on his interest, as he once put it, in “finding out what actually goes on
with the child, thereby fulfilling Donna’s mad prophecy. From this in the world.” His credits include three non-fiction features, among
point on Vengeance transforms into a melodrama of almost occult them the PBS film Dying (1976), a portrait of death as unadorned
intensity as it observes the struggle between Jo and Donna, who and unsentimental as its title; his professed artistic affinities are
increasingly appear to us like good and evil spirits fighting over the with contemporaries such as Frederick Wiseman, Albert Maysles,
possession of the child. and Richard Leacock; and even his fiction features, with their keen
Vengeance Is Mine belongs to a ghost-story genre that originated in attention to environment and milieu, have marked vérité qualities.
Victorian England, and whose transmission across the Atlantic can What the comparison reveals is that for Roemer, as for James,
be traced through the works of such writers as Henry James. Indeed, “realism” and “reality” do not follow the same principles. Realism
James’ fiction provides at least two instructive points of comparison strives to create a surface that is “like” reality. Reality, though, is
for Vengeance. The first has to do with character and story structure, far more elusive and complex, and often confronts us with ineffa-
namely, how James’ heroines concoct theories about the unknown, ble qualities and ghostly demarcations that the strictest realism
and how their desire to vindicate their ideas drives the plot towards cannot fully encompass. William James once wrote that his brother
a terrible outcome. In The Turn of the Screw, possibly James’ most Henry’s later work was composed of “impalpable materials, air and
celebrated story—and certainly the one most frequently adapted the prismatic interferences of light, ingeniously focused by mirrors
for the screen—a young governess becomes convinced not just that upon empty space.” Similarly, in Vengeance Roemer does not simply

40
reproduce spaces, as a documentary realist might, but marshals all remiss to ask whether we have traded the waters of New England for
the cinematographic effects at his disposal to show how these spac- the Styx. Likewise, although it is possible to read the film’s events as
es merge with their inhabitants in shimmering, shadowy configu- having a solid, objective existence, Roemer’s elliptical presentation
rations, capturing that spectral quality which forever haunts what draws out the subjective aspect of the story, allowing us to see its
we often think of as our strictly material existence. As Vengeance happenings as the emanations of a disturbed mind, or as taking place
unfolds, certain scenes and passages—a fleeting glimpse of the cur- in the ethereal realms of spirit.
tained room in which Jo was locked up when she got pregnant at 16; It is this doubled quality that gives Vengeance its final moral am-
the sight of Donna walking like a ghost at night, refracted through a biguity. In the film’s various scenes of domestic strife, we discern the
window flowing with rain; an eerie vigil for Jo’s adopted mother in a dim outline of a story structure that has its roots in ancient rituals
hospital room, the plastic curtain around the bed acting as a parody of sacrifice: specifically, the expulsion of a scapegoat (or pharmakos)
of a veil—begin to float free of the film’s ostensibly realist context, figure, which is also, in this case, the exorcism of a ghost. Watching
expanding into the ghostly realm of the supernatural. This is not re- Vengeance, we initially feel, as Jo does, that Tom and Jackie would
alism, exactly, but who’s to say that it isn’t reality? be better off without Donna; we might feel, too, that Jo would be an
Roemer achieves these effects chiefly by loosening, or even re- ideal maternal substitute. But at the film’s climax, when we see that,
moving, causal linkages between scenes, eliding the connective tis- in the name of protecting Jackie, Jo is not only willing to let Donna
sue one typically expects of realist narrative. When a scene of Jo at kill herself but also to manipulate her into doing so, another dimen-
her adopted mother’s deathbed cuts to a shimmering shot of a flow- sion of Vengeance crystallizes. In the moment of Jo’s decision to let
ing river, then to Jo gliding along in a canoe being paddled by Tom Donna die, in her terrible epiphany of what she is capable of, we
and Jackie, and then to a graceful montage of a camping trip, the lack catch a glimpse of a world where Jo, not Donna, is the malevolent
of contextualization gives the passage the quality of a dream. One of ghost to be exorcised.
Roemer’s most frequent strategies in Vengeance is to minimize the “Aren’t you haunted by the past?” Donna had asked Jo just a few
spatial continuity between shots and scenes, thereby granting each scenes before. “You should be. It’s just like mine.” By the end of
shot—each close-up, each shadowy interior, each floating move- Vengeance, the symmetrical pattern this indicates is now complete.
ment—an unusual intensity. Action becomes secondary to affect; (We might observe that, like any proper Cassandra figure, everything
event gives way to epiphany. Characters do not seem to move into Donna prophesies comes true.) The final shot sees Jo once again
spaces so much as materialize and dematerialize within them. seated on a plane, an ambiguous smile playing on her face. Her va-
All this creates in Vengeance a curious bifocal quality: we dis- cant look suggests that she may not be all there; we might even won-
cern in the film’s various situations not just a realistic surface, but der whether everything we saw was just in her head. But whether
also an underlying mythic shape. The ferry passages to and from the story we have just witnessed is a dream, a premonition, or some
Donna’s house on Block Island eventually seem to shuttle not be- ghostly visitation, it is in the end no less real for being so—no less a
tween shores, but between life and death—when Roemer holds on a part of what actually goes on in the world. In Vengeance Is Mine, we
fog-shrouded shot of the boat in the seconds before the ramp is low- find a fantasy with just as much reality as the objective world, a ghost
ered, the entire scene suspended in eerie stillness, one would not be story that bears a truth beyond realism.

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The Motern Method
The Films of Matt Farley and Charlie Roxburgh

BY WILL SLOAN

Heard She Got Married

Full disclosure: I am credited as an associate producer on Magic Spot first movie, an hour-long comedy shot in their college dormitory
(2022), the latest movie by Matt Farley and Charlie Roxburgh. Lest called The Paperboy (1999), and their most ambitious, a buddy-cop
you think this presents a conflict of interest in writing about them, parody called Slingshot Cops (2016), their films accumulated an
I assure you that it is only a credit. One day last April, Farley took to Altmanesque repertory company of family members, co-workers,
Twitter offering associate producer credits for anyone willing to pay, friends, acquaintances, and anybody else who would agree to join
so I sent $200 for the privilege of seeing my name onscreen in a mov- them on a weekend for a few hours’ filming. The filmmakers have also
ie by two filmmakers who I think are among the best working today. sought to include the audience in that community: their recent films
The credit is at least partly a joke: “associate producers” typi- feature characters named after donors to a crowdfunding campaign,
cally have much deeper pockets than me or the nine other Farley/ and incorporate footage shot with fans at Farley’s annual “Motern
Roxburgh fans with whom I share credit. It is also partly not a joke: Extravaganza” music event (“Motern Media” is the name of the ad
since 1999, Farley and Roxburgh have made 14 feature-length films hoc company that encompasses all of Farley’s creative endeavours).
and lost money on every single one, so donations are appreciat- Local Legends (2013) includes a scene in which Farley flashes his
ed. But, on a deeper level, the credit is not a joke, because the films actual phone number onscreen and encourages viewers to call him
of Farley/Roxburgh are community enterprises. Between their (a scan of the user reviews on Letterboxd shows that many do). Post

42
about one of their movies on Twitter, and Farley (@MoternMedia) alogue in a slightly stilted manner (sample line: “My last instructor
will invariably respond. was an indecorous deviant who tried to see me and my friends dis-
From 1999 to 2016, Farley and Roxburgh’s films had virtually no robing”). As with Andy Warhol or Tim & Eric, their use of non-ac-
audience. In recent years, a small but real following has developed. tors in a movie-star capacity carries a trace of media satire. Unlike
The cult has been a genuinely grassroots phenomenon, aided by the those artists, however, Farley/Roxburgh code their actors as or-
easy online availability of the films and built through Letterboxd re- dinary, everyday people rather than eccentric showbiz strivers.
views, podcasts, tweets, and old-fashioned word of mouth. Most fans Importantly, these performers are drawn from the filmmakers’ own
come to Farley/Roxburgh through one of their genre spoofs, such as social circles, thus raising fewer fraught questions about power dy-
the slasher pastiche Freaky Farley (2007) or the monster comedies namics and exploitation. At their best, the Farley/Roxburgh movies
Monsters, Marriage and Murder in Manchvegas (2009) and Don’t Let feel like a neighbourhood barbecue where everyone decided to put
the Riverbeast Get You! (2013). Now, having finally grown an audi- on a show. If one of the key ideas in Warhol’s cinema was, “What if
ence, these relentlessly productive DIY filmmakers as an aesthetic this person starred in a movie?” then Farley/Roxburgh’s idea is clos-
are throwing their viewers a curveball with three new features that er to, “Movies are for everyone.”
move sharply away from their previous work, even as they build on The filmmakers have described their work as “backyard movies”
ideas that have been developed over the course of a long filmogra- of the sort that children make with their parents’ camcorders. They
phy. The best sales pitch I can give for Farley/Roxburgh’s recent run also draw inspiration from regional horror auteurs of the ’70s and
of Heard She Got Married (2021), Metal Detector Maniac (2021), ’80s, like Bill Rebane (The Giant Spider Invasion, 1975) and Don
and Magic Spot is to describe them as funny, New England–based Dohler (Nightbeast, 1982), whose low-budget, visibly handmade
spiritual cousins of Hong Sangsoo. work often had more sizzle than steak. Like so many of its inspira-
But first, a little more on the filmmakers themselves. Roxburgh tions, Don’t Let the Riverbeast Get You! shows its title monster only
(who is typically credited as director) and Farley (the producer, lead occasionally, and is interested much more in the lives and loves of
actor, and general frontman) met at Providence College in Rhode its small-town heroes. Because Farley/Roxburgh’s run of genre com-
Island in the late ’90s, where their long collaboration began. Neither edies, from Freaky Farley to Slingshot Cops, play consciously with
of them makes a living from filmmaking: Roxburgh has worked as “bad” aesthetics, I want to take a moment to emphasize that their
a visual effects artist, while Farley is a musician, notable for having films are not bad-on-purpose larks like, say, The Lost Skeleton of
written over 23,000 songs. Over a decade ago, Farley realized that the Cadavra (2001), but are, in fact, very good movies. The filmmakers
meagre streaming royalties from one song, multiplied by thousands are technically capable (two of their films were shot on 35mm, at a
of songs, could add up to a living wage, and so he got to work pumping time when the technology was nearing obsolescence), possess an ear
out dozens of songs per day. A serious musician when time allows, for funny and unusual dialogue, and consistently develop textured
Farley makes his bread and butter from novelty songs about popu- cinematic universes full of details that reward repeat viewings.
lar search-engine terms: animals, foods, celebrity names, birthdays, Take Riverbeast, for example, which follows the travails of Neil
and bodily functions (his “The Poop Song,” written and performed Stuart (Farley), famed as the greatest tutor that the sleepy borough
under the pseudonym The Toilet Bowl Cleaners, is a big hit with the of Rivertown, U.S.A. has ever known. The film begins as Neil, who left
kindergarten set, with over 4.8 million streams). His absurdly prolif- town in disgrace many years previously after raising a ruckus over
ic discography has earned him slightly irreverent profiles in venues an alleged riverbeast sighting, returns to resume his career, win back
like Wired and The Wall Street Journal, a 2016 appearance on The his ex-fiancée Emmaline, and hopefully prove once and for all that
Tonight Show, and social media shout-outs from the likes of Billie the creature is real. Other characters in the film’s busy diegesis in-
Eilish and Kris Jenner, as well as the rare privilege of being able to clude Sparky Watts, muckraking reporter for the Rivertown U.S.A.
live off his creativity. Daily Standard; Frank Stone, “former professional athlete,” who
From 2000 to 2017, Farley worked around the edges of a day job is seen playing a different sport every time he is onscreen; and Ito
at a group home for teenagers in Manchester, New Hampshire, a Hootkins, a big-game hunter and reputed ladies’ man. Because the
leafy, idyllic-looking town not unlike the nameless one that Calvin & Farley/Roxburgh players are so straight-faced and sincere, and be-
Hobbes used to ride their wagon through, and the backdrop of Farley cause the writing is so sharp and sense of place so strong, there is
and Roxburgh’s pre-2016 films. While the recent films are large- always a moment about two-thirds of the way through one of these
ly shot around Farley’s current home of Danvers, Massachusetts, genre parodies when I realize that I’m not just laughing—I actually
several scenes still feature Manchester, where many of the Farley/ care about these characters.
Roxburgh repertory company still live. Perhaps the most belov- Farley/Roxburgh’s embrace of the horror-comedy template was
ed of these is Kevin McGee, Farley’s former boss, whose hulking at least partly pragmatic, as they hoped that the genre hook would
physique and terse, deadpan performance style make him ideal make for an easy sell to first-time viewers and potential distributors.
for villains and authority figures. Other recurring players include Farley made the relationship between art and commerce central to
Farley’s wife, Elizabeth M. Peterson; his father, Jim Farley; his uncle Local Legends, his only movie to date without Roxburgh, but one
Jim McHugh; Farley and Roxburgh’s college friend Tom Scalzo; and that introduced ideas that have developed in the duo’s recent work.
Scalzo’s sister Sharon. Farley here stars as “Matt Farley,” a New England–based songwriter
Like John Waters, Farley/Roxbrugh have a rich vocabulary and who struggles to balance his creative pursuits with a day job at an
enjoy hearing their non-actor friends recite reams of loquacious di- old-age care facility (an inverse of his real-life job group-home job,

43
 Magic Spot

and one of several touches that slightly complicates a direct autobio- Of course, persisting in making movies for no audience also takes
graphical reading of the film). The Farley of Local Legends is working its toll. This is why a key moment in Farley/Roxburgh’s creative re-
to make songwriting his career, and struggling with the cold reality surgence came in the pandemic summer of 2020, when Brooklyn’s
that his hacky novelty songs far outgross his more personal music. Spectacle Theater and Toronto’s Laserblast Film Society collaborat-
In several scenes, Farley splits himself into duelling artist and busi- ed on an online retrospective via Twitch. Here, Farley and Roxburgh
nessman personae for a series of business meetings. (“Does the world were able to revisit their early work while directly interacting with
really need a song about gluten?” asks Artist Farley; Businessman their growing fanbase, which they found was comprised more of
Farley replies, “I searched for ‘gluten’ on iTunes, I searched for ‘glu- omnivorous cinephiles than strict genre buffs. On his Motern Media
ten’ on Spotify—almost nothing came up. When people search ‘glu- Information Podcast, Farley announced his and Roxburgh’s inten-
ten’ they’re gonna find this song you’re gonna make about gluten and tion to make ten movies in five years; since 2021, they have already
they’re gonna love it!’”) produced self-distributed three films (a fourth, Boston Johnny, is
The story is structured around Farley’s preparation for a concert promised for later this year). The results are an impressive step for-
gig, which, as the film goes on, is downgraded from a 1,500-seat audi- ward for the filmmakers, harnessing the offbeat acting, dialogue, and
torium to a suburban basement with an audience of seven. Crucially, storytelling style of their earlier movies to create a mood that can be
however, this unimpressive-seeming event turns out to be rousing odd and unsettling in addition to being funny.
fun for all who attend. The Matt Farley of Local Legends is a sort-of As with the work of Hong Sangsoo, Farley/Roxburgh’s filmogra-
digital-age Llewyn Davis, ambiguously talented and destined to nev- phy has become like a long conversation in which themes develop
er fully “make it” in his desired field. Unlike Llewyn, though, Farley over time. Heard She Got Married, which functions as something
never loses a simmering hope that recognition will come, even as he of a downbeat counterpoint to Local Legends, stars Farley as Mitch
also comes to accept creativity as its own reward. Owens, a singer-songwriter who achieved some middling success
In a section of Local Legends dedicated to his filmmaking, Farley as a touring musician, but is now returning to his hometown with
estimates that each of his movies with Roxburgh costs the price of a a vague whiff of unfulfilled potential. The friends with whom he
used car, but adds, “I’d rather have a bunch of movies than a bunch once dreamed of conquering the music industry have now receded
of used cars.” But 2013 was a different time in their lives, and the into quiet domesticity, and relations are especially strained with
battle doesn’t get easier in middle age. Now in their forties, with Tom Scalzo (Phil Kelhofner), the onetime Garfunkel to his Simon.
families and mortgages, the filmmakers and many of their collabo- As noted above, Tom Scalzo happens to be the name of Farley’s
rators can no longer spend their savings or sacrifice their weekends real-life friend, collaborator, and frequent co-star, who appeared
quite as easily. The logistics of making Slingshot Cops—specifically in Local Legends as himself, still jamming in the basement; here, the
its centrepiece party scene, which brought together almost the en- two men have been through a bitter falling-out that led Kelhofner’s
tire repertory company—was a breaking point in the filmmakers’ “Tom Scalzo” to abandon music and marry Mitch’s onetime girl-
old working method. For five years thereafter, there were no new friend, Tara Edwards (Elizabeth Peterson). “He didn’t believe in the
feature-length Farley/Roxburgh films. music the way that I did,” says Mitch. “To him it was just like a fun

44
thing to do on the weekends. To me, it was everything.” But every- value on the act of creation than the end result, and allows for a free
where he goes, Mitch is reminded that assimilating into the adult interplay between art and life. In his self-published 2021 book The
world often means giving up on our dreams. Motern Method, Farley describes a typical college songwriting ses-
Into Mitch’s life enters Van Hickman (Chris Peterson), an ama- sion with Scalzo: “Tom and I would prepare by making a huge list of
teur bassist eager to collaborate on new music. Their work togeth- song ideas. There were no rules. The topics could be deep and philo-
er seems poised to spark a creative rebirth, until Mitch learns that sophical or silly and nonsensical. Then we’d race through the list in a
Van Hickman has been snooping on people from Mitch’s past. If Van weekend, just making up a new song for each topic, one after anoth-
Hickman represents the future, then why is he dredging up these er.” The results: “Some of the songs would be awful. Some of them
people? By the end of the film, it is uncertain if Van Hickman existed would be weird. A few were simply brilliant. We eventually learned
at all. Perhaps he is the part of Mitch that hangs on to the dreams he that this method worked for us.”
had in college; maybe it’s time for Mitch to reckon with the reality All of Farley/Roxburgh’s ideas coalesce in the surprisingly mov-
that those dreams can never be fulfilled—or at least fulfilled in the ing time-travel movie Magic Spot. The setting is another fictional
same way. New England town; the inciting incident is the discovery of a “magic
In contrast to its predecessor, Metal Detector Maniac is a straight spot” in the woods that enables time travel, but, if used incorrect-
comedy that stars Farley and Tom Scalzo (the real one this time) ly, will consign users to an otherworldly realm called “the Beyond”;
as versions of themselves, in a scenario in which their real-life col- and the characters are a variety of local creatives of varying levels of
lege-era band Moes Haven—which split up due to its lack of popu- fame, all of them longing, to one degree or another, to live in anoth-
larity—has paved the way for its former members to find success as er time. The complicated plot is dense with sci-fi jargon (the main
esteemed college music professors. The story begins with the duo source of humour is hearing the actors spout their tangled dialogue
on a research sabbatical, where they quickly become obsessed by a so nonchalantly, which, once again, is very funny), but it ultimately
man with a metal detector at their local park. They agree he seems leads to a simple, resonant point about the importance of living in
creepy, and decide to alert the authorities. When the cops refuse to the present. This point encompasses the act of creation, with Farley/
investigate, they take matters into their own hands, launching an Roxburgh celebrating art and artmaking as something for the mo-
all-consuming investigation into the stranger. Does this sound like ment rather than for posterity. Life becomes complicated, circum-
a funny premise to you? No? Well, Farley/Roxburgh insist that it is, stances change, but the ability to make art is always with us.
and single-mindedly continue down the shaggy-dog path until you Most movies we see are by people who have “made it.” There are
start laughing helplessly. many reasons to love the films of Matt Farley and Charlie Roxburgh,
The film, which ultimately reaches a conclusion that can only be and chief among them is how they articulate both the struggle and
compared to Crimes and Misdemeanors (1989), climaxes with Farley the necessity of remaining creative even when any hope of “making
and Scalzo presenting the fruits of their “research”: a long, impro- it” falls away. The “art for art’s sake” ethos doesn’t get easier when
vised rock album in which they sing every detail of their investiga- you get older, but to stop creating is to die. On his podcast, Farley
tion. Funny as it is, the film’s climactic scene also articulates some- promises he will slow down his filmmaking if he’s still not breaking
thing of Farley/Roxburgh’s artistic philosophy, which places more even in five years. We’ll see about that.

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Metal Detector Maniac
What Is Cinema?
Olivier Assayas on Irma Vep
BY BEATRICE LOAYZA

“Who? What? Where? When?” reads one of the advertisements production collapses. Yet even as this first iteration of Irma Vep
for Louis Feuillade’s 1915 serial Les vampires. Above these words, suggests that the cinema of today lacks the spark to create a com-
a question mark cradles the masked head of one Irma Vep (in- parably seductive spectacle, it also achieves a sense of wonder and
carnated onscreen by the legendary music-hall performer fascination from the presence of Cheung: an outsider perched
Musidora), with only her twinkling eyes in view, pulling us deep- atop Parisian rooftops, a woman in crisis who attains a kind of
er into her mystery. Decades later, in Olivier Assayas’ Irma Vep self-knowledge through the role’s requisite self-abandon. Cheung
(1996), Maggie Cheung—playing an alternate-universe version proves that Irma Vep is not merely a character one plays, but a
of herself who is summoned to Paris to play Irma Vep in a flashy, spirit one inhabits like a fever dream.
internationally co-produced remake of Les vampires—dons a Assayas’ latest effort, an eight-part HBO remake of his master-
mystique-conferring catsuit to re-embody Musidora’s criminal piece about a failed remake, performs a similar resurrection—af-
mastermind, only to be ultimately fired from the role when the ter all, it was only a matter of who, what, where, when Irma Vep

46
would rise again. In the new Irma Vep, the events of the 1996 tion history of Les vampires using the same cast: René as Feuillade,
film are restaged and readjusted for the streaming era, the world Mira as Musidora, etc. With a bit of explanatory dialogue courtesy
of superhero movie franchises, iPhones, and prestige television. of René’s discussions with Mira, these suspensions of the series’
Standing in for the parafictional Cheung is Mira (Alicia Vikander), present-day reality provide windows into the anarchic spirit that
a hyper-professional American movie star whose claim to fame animated early film, unbeholden as it was to any kind of artistic
are her Marvel-esque Doomsday movies, gigs she’s not exactly blueprint or standard of conduct—whatever movie magic came
proud of. Hoping to artistically distance herself from her block- of those lawless, pioneering sets was a product of improvisation,
buster meal ticket, Mira heads to Paris to star as Irma Vep in a se- reckless ingenuity, and fate.
ries-length remake of Les vampires that is being directed by the Where Feuillade’s Les vampires thus took shape in the film-in-
eccentric (and wildly unstable) René Vidal (Vincent Macaigne, dustry equivalent of the Wild West, Assayas’ pair of metacinemat-
replacing Jean-Pierre Léaud from the original film). ic descendants from it emerged from an industry that has been
Invoking not only his original Irma Vep but also the “mak- transformed by digitization, globalization, and new channels of
ing-of” touchstones of Truffaut’s La nuit américaine (1973) and distribution. Assayas’ films consistently exult the vertiginous
Fassbinder’s Beware of a Holy Whore (1971), Assayas here sum- qualities of modern life, where identities and personal convic-
mons a similar kind of film set-within-the-film intrigue that, this tions are thrown in crisis by the instruments of global intercon-
time, is informed by contemporary discourses around issues of nectivity—market forces, surveillance technologies, social media.
consent, onscreen sensuality, and narrative intent. For example, With both versions of Irma Vep, Assayas looks to the ruptures be-
Edmond (Vincent Lacoste), the actor playing the putative hero tween the production processes and moviemaking cultures of then
of Les vampires, constantly quarrels with René about the moti- and now to create comedy and tragedy about what it means to want
vations of his character: woefully (if hilariously) oblivious to the to continue the fight, the folly, that is making movies, continuously
project’s deliberate obliqueness and emphasis on atmosphere, posing that vital and unanswerable question—“What is cinema?”—
he is unaware that his protagonist is supposed to be impotent and in order to recalibrate our perception of what it could be and what
underdeveloped. Later in the series, a faction of the cast and crew it’s not amid such endless reinvention and recontextualization.
confront René over a racy scene between an unconscious Irma While the crackling intrusion of Sonic Youth into the new Irma
Vep and her lascivious nemesis, Moreno, arguing that the moment Vep, as well as a surreal departure from the series’ dominant mode
victimizes and demeans a feminist icon. When asked to weigh in, of realism, mirrors the 1996 original’s dizzying breaks from real-
however, Mira disagrees with the rebels: the point of the scene is ity, the parameters of multi-episode serialization have allowed
not about ensuring a woman’s empowerment, but creating an at- Assayas to not only replicate but also expand the canvas of his tale,
mosphere of hot-and-bothered sensuality. adding more sprawling interpersonal dramas and layers of self-re-
Off set, meanwhile, love triangles multiply and unravel as flexivity. As the production nears its end, René prepares to return
fraught power dynamics and inner demons conspire to threaten to his family life outside the cinema and Mira signs on to her
the completion of the production. Mira, still in the grips of erotic next project, where she will play the coveted lead role in the new
obsession with her former assistant, Laurie (Adria Arjona), who film by some Quentin Tarantino– or Terrence Malick–adjacent
is now shacked up with Mira’s ex-director, strikes up a tenuous American auteur. These cycles continue, and Assayas emphasizes
flirtation with costume designer Zoe (Jeanne Balibar); simulta- their flattened progression, keeping the show’s final moments at
neously, the relationship between Mira and her current assistant, a low frequency of quiet resignation and wizened acceptance. Yet
shrewd aspiring filmmaker Regina (Devon Ross), threatens to moments of grace and mystery still float to the surface. On Mira’s
proceed along similarly charged (and potentially abusive) lines last night in Paris, Zoe has one final request: that Mira dance for
as that of her previous amour fou. Comparably banal yet poten- her as she has done repeatedly, mesmerizingly, throughout the
tially more nefarious than Mira’s romantic entanglements are the series as both herself and Irma Vep. She does, and there is no ex-
machinations of the financiers, producers, and agents who hover plaining nor theorizing it. The dance captivates outside of time.
around the periphery of the production, seeing nothing but legal
liabilities and profit-making opportunities in the art and the art-
ists they manage. René, for his part, struggles to mount his fastid- Cinema Scope: When did you first encounter Les vampires?
iously conceived version of Les vampires not only under the long Olivier Assayas: When I was younger, I saw some of it at the
shadow of Feuillade’s original, but also that of his own attempted Cinémathèque française, which was the only place where you could
remake decades prior—as well as the memory of his ex-wife, Jade see it at the time. We’re talking about the Neanderthal period…
Lee (Vivian Wu), a conspicuous reference to Cheung, Assayas’ Scope: So, the ’80s?
former partner. Assayas: The late ’70s and early ’80s. Les vampires was saved
As shooting of René’s Les vampires unfolds, Assayas includes by Henri Langlois, who found a negative of the film in the late ’40s
long stretches of the original black-and-white serial as if to en- and had it copied. That was the only existing print. The original ni-
courage us to compare it to René’s hyperstylized recreations trate print is obviously unusable. I’m saying this so you get a sense
(which often come together through laughably undignified of how rarely it was screened at the time. Occasionally, as a gift to
means). Occasionally, Assayas assumes the look and mode of the audience, Langlois would show an episode here and there, so
René’s filmmaking to restage significant moments in the produc- that’s how I saw one or two of them. Years later, when I had started

47
making films, I was asked to program an evening of movies. I chose ers wanted to shoot something, or represent this or that idea or
a Bresson, Maurice Pialat’s L’amour existe (1960), and two episodes sentiment, they had to figure out how to do it for themselves.
from Les vampires. I was amazed at how good it was. There was no canon, no preconceived sense of cinematic lan-
Scope: And you’re clearly still fascinated by it. Enough that guage. Everything was in the process of being defined. This idea of
you’d want to return to it decades later after already making one magic was literal, too—many perceived that cinema was real mag-
film in conversation with it. ic! It’s very hard for us to put ourselves in the context of people
Assayas: I love how it is both innocent and erotic, which makes who saw moving images for the first time, this idea of seeing re-
for a unique blend in the history of cinema. And it was made with ality reproduced as something simultaneously extremely realis-
the enthusiasm and craziness that drove early filmmaking, which tic and dreamlike. The black-and-white images bring that surreal
is something I’ve always felt nostalgic for. I would have loved to quality: it’s reality, but it’s not reality. It’s something else.
have been a filmmaker when it all started. I would have also loved Scope: René struggles to capture some of that magic with his
to be making movies in the early ’60s, when independent films version of Les vampires, but I think he realizes it’s impossible. Can
suddenly appeared and things opened up. There was no limit to the cinema of today feel fresh in the same way it did back then?
what you could do. But I suppose I’ve always been fascinated by Can it be magical?
serials, including literature. I wrote my master’s thesis on French Assayas: It’s maybe impossible to go back to that state of in-
science-fiction serial novels, which were originally published nocence that drove silent filmmaking. The spirit is sometimes
for very cheap and later rediscovered and championed. So, Les revived, but it can’t be recreated. It would be folly to think so.
vampires has always occupied a very special place in my imag- Occasionally, you have filmmakers who come on the scene and re-
ination. When I made Irma Vep, I realized that not only did Les invent everything. The French New Wave expanded the limits of
vampires fascinate me as a cinematic event, but there was also what was doable. You have the American experimental filmmak-
something more to it that spoke directly to me, something that ers—Kenneth Anger, Andy Warhol, Stan Brakhage, Jonas Mekas—
was a part of me. Making the first Irma Vep was like undergoing and also John Cassavetes. They started from scratch, in a sense,
psychoanalysis, you know? Stuff that I had repressed and that I or maybe they restarted from scratch. It’s possible to rewind, to
had never used in my movies came to the surface. forget the rules and what it is you’re supposed to do or not do. But
Scope: In Irma Vep, René Vidal also talks about the seductive it doesn’t happen much.
force of Les vampires—a primitive kind of magic to seeing all these Scope: Let’s talk about the show within the show. René’s ver-
things being captured on film for the first time. sion of Les vampires is sometimes quite beautiful and effective,
Assayas: Yes, there’s a beauty to it. Every time those filmmak- especially when Alicia Vikander dances. Sometimes it’s silly, like

48
when you see the actors run around trying to do the same ridicu- with in the past, and I did it with the same spirit and energy. There
lous things that Feuillade’s actors had to do. People throw them- are some challenges that are unique. Because it’s a series, we had
selves down steps and cling to moving vehicles. to work super-fast, which was difficult because I wanted to keep
Assayas: This René Vidal has the same problem as the René my standards and style. We were given about nine or ten days per
Vidal played by Jean-Pierre Léaud in the original Irma Vep: he’s episode, which was tough. On the other hand, budget wasn’t as
taken on a project that is basically undoable. Léaud’s character much of a concern, and I was given the freedom to invent this cra-
instantly realizes it doesn’t work, which paralyzes him early on. zy story and have this weird mix of crazy actors. And there weren’t
For him, the only solution is to destroy his own material. In this any issues about length. With movies, there’s always a problem
version, it’s a different era, a different moment. with the money and the length. We finished under budget!
Scope: The era of streaming. Scope: Speaking of crazy actors, Lars Eidinger is incredible as
Assayas: That’s right. René Vidal has gotten himself into a Gottfried. He’s so magnetic and chaotic—but, of course, he’s also a
mess because he’s agreed to do a series, which by today’s stand- crack addict! He seems like a character that’s been plucked out of
ards means something that involves much more narrative than time, and like he’d belong on one of Feuillade’s wild sets.
anything Louis Feuillade ever did. So, it does at times end up be- Assayas: For me, he comes out of a Fassbinder movie. I’ve made
ing pure comedy. However, René is asking himself the right ques- two movies with Lars, and this is our third time working together.
tions. He realizes he’s not working within the right framework to Previously, he’s played much more serious characters for me; it
accomplish whatever it is he hopes to accomplish. turned out he was holding back. At that point I had never seen him
Scope: At one point René insists he’s making a film, not a televi- on stage, though he’s a big star in German theatre and has worked
sion series. Do you feel the same way about Irma Vep? with big-deal directors like Thomas Ostermeier. Then I saw him
Assayas: Yes, of course that’s how I feel! I couldn’t have made a play Richard III, and I was shocked. He spoke directly to the audi-
movie of this length and of this nature for a theatrical setting. The ence, walked through the aisles, threw stuff around. He was crazy.
financiers know that people aren’t going to sit there and watch an That’s when I realized there was another dimension to him that
eight-hour story. I knew this had to be financed by TV people, so I I wanted to use. Gottfried is an homage to the craziness of ’70s
knew I had to agree to the narrative framework of a series. In that independent cinema, specifically Fassbinder, Werner Schroeter,
sense, in terms of narrative, some of it is more TV-like, but it’s ulti- and that entire generation of German filmmakers who were huge-
mately one film with an arc and a beginning, middle, and end. The ly influential for me when I started making movies. Cinema was
way I shot it was no different from the way I shot my other films. I part of the counterculture in many ways back then, so Gottfried
did it with the same crew and many of the same actors I’ve worked embodies that craziness, that irresponsibility.

49
 Scope: In his incredible send-off speech, he talks about film- gal, and you have wacky people like René Vidal given free rein—
makers once being like rock ’n’ roll stars. Rock music and punk has sort of. To the Americans over in Los Angeles, Mira’s commitment
always had a kind of spiritual influence on your work. to finishing Les vampires doesn’t make any sense.
Assayas: Of course, but I think it has become too clean and pol- Assayas: In France, there is less control by the industry. It’s not
ished. Rock ’n’ roll used to be much rawer when it was not officially a matter of the US being this way and Europe being that way. For
part of the industry. As much as I’m a fan of indie rock, I can’t help me it’s a question of freedom, because when you have freedom, it’s
but notice that it’s everywhere. You go to a shoe store and they’re cinema. This is the answer to all the questions about what makes
playing indie rock. Your plane lands, you hear indie rock. Rock something a series or a film. When you have something that’s
music has become a sort of wallpaper for our times. highly controlled by the industry, it’s not cinema: it’s an industry
Scope: In the first Irma Vep there’s that incredible Sonic Youth product. With Irma Vep, I’m trying to portray characters who are
needle drop, and here you have Thurston Moore writing some of struggling with these difficult questions and contradictions. They
the score. are trying to be as free as they can, and make the best possible use
Assayas: I’m so fond of Thurston Moore, who I consider one of of that freedom, but they are still working for an industry with
the few people who has kept intact the spirit of experimentation, commercial interests. Today, it’s very difficult to define with any
the wildness, of rock music. It’s come at a price for him. It means certainty what cinema is and what it’s not. The boundaries are
at once carrying the soul of what indie rock should be, and remain- moving and we are undergoing a process of transformation that
ing a marginal figure. will redefine the meaning of cinema. We have no idea where we’ll
Scope: What was the music you used for the scenes from the end up.
original Les vampires? It sounds more modern than the score in Scope: In episode five, “Hypnotic Eyes,” some members of the
the version I’ve seen. cast and crew are scandalized about a scene in which Irma Vep is
Assayas: We used the score from the Gaumont restoration. The touched by the villain, Moreno, while she’s unconscious. There
original was done electronically, and the sound was very poor, so are also some humorous back-and-forths about shooting a sex
we reorchestrated it with real instruments, which took a great scene with an intimacy coordinator. Do these attitudes and new
deal of time. practices—which seem to be less a matter of real principles than
Scope: When I first found out that Alicia Vikander would be one of insurance coverage and legal liability—play into this idea of
playing Irma Vep—or, rather, the actress playing Irma Vep—I industry control eradicating the sense of adventure from cinema?
wasn’t a fan of the idea. I couldn’t help but think of her blank- Assayas: Movies, like rock ’n’ roll music, were once areas where
faced robot character in Ex Machina (2014), who is like the oppo- morality was not a factor. Now, morals are involved. I’m not sure
site of Musidora. But as the series continued, I realized she has what to think of it. I do agree with a lot of it, but I also think it
always had this incredible physicality—no wonder she was cast in ends up affecting the balance of cinema. My perception of what
Tomb Raider (2018). Did you see that? cinema is has always had to do with the subconscious—meaning,
Assayas: Yes! Though I knew Alicia before Tomb Raider, and I cinema allows your subconscious to speak. This also means, when
also knew that she had been trained as a dancer. I wouldn’t have you’re making movies, you don’t completely know what you’re do-
made Irma Vep without her. I knew I needed her for the char- ing. Now you absolutely have to know what you’re doing and you
acter of Irma Vep, who has a certain candour, purity, and sense have to be careful about it, too, because you might have to explain
of humour. She also needed to be played by someone who can yourself and justify why you’ve done something this or that way.
experiment with her body. That’s why I had Alicia in mind, be- I had never really asked myself those questions before, and
cause I sensed she could do it based on her earlier films, includ- though I’m okay with asking myself them now, I wonder wheth-
ing Tomb Raider. er they’re affecting the process. I don’t think I tackle these issues
Alicia is also very independent and opinionated. She has a very seriously in Irma Vep, but I do turn them into comedy. Besides,
clear idea of what she’s doing and how she’s doing it. At the same it’s not like we’re seeing someone like Pasolini make Salò (1975).
time, she’s never really had the opportunity to simply let go and Pasolini went all the way: he made something that was truly dan-
push things as far as possible. This is similar to what happened gerous, something that likely wouldn’t be possible to make any-
with Kristen Stewart. When I first worked with Kristen, and then more. I’m just being ironic.
Alicia, I was working with an actress who had never really had the Scope: The idea of watching a classic like Les vampires on an
freedom to invent and create something new with their perfor- iPhone or a tablet is considered a great sacrilege to many of us
mance. To me, they are not simply actresses: they are important cinephiles, so it felt oddly provocative to see the characters in
parts of the film’s creative process. They need to have the space Irma Vep watch so many scenes from it on their tiny screens.
for it, so I encourage and push them. They can go as far as they Assayas: Sometimes it’s the only option! Sometimes the film
want. They can go off script. Whatever they want, so long as they isn’t around, or maybe you don’t want to pay a fortune to access
enjoy it. the restored Blu-ray that’s part of a boxset or whatever. It all costs
Scope: Your films often touch on the finer, practical details of money. Here, the big difference is that these people are working,
the creative industries they depict. Here, there’s a marked differ- so you can’t just have them watch a 35mm print. Actually, Les
ence between Hollywood and the French film industry: we see the vampires happens to be public domain. When I was writing the
French crew working with paper scripts, there’s a desire to be fru- screenplay, I used Wikipedia to refer back to certain scenes. The

50
links to all the episodes are on there. They’re dreadful quality, but be a part of it. Or at least that’s my utopia. Apart from that, I’m
if I wanted to check on a detail, or a title, I was able to do it in- very close to René.
stantly. I didn’t have to go through the whole process of having to With Jean-Pierre Léaud in the original Irma Vep, I was deal-
set up a screen next to me. Obviously, I don’t watch movies on my ing with the Jean-Pierre Léaud, who is obviously not me at all. He
iPhone, and I almost never watch them on my tablet or my com- was playing an older filmmaker from another generation who has
puter. I prefer a big screen or a projector. You can use your tele- gone through the violence of the creative process and has become
phone as a sort of notebook, or as a reminder—that’s how it’s used rather fragile and neurotic as a result. I looked at him as if he were
in Irma Vep. Bottom line: any movie, whatever it is, will always look someone else, and his character deals with different demons than
better on a big screen, there’s no way around it. It’s a fact of life. mine. Then time passed—all of a sudden, I realized that I’d be-
Scope: My final question might be a loaded one. Can you talk come my own character, that I’d become René Vidal. I mean, I’m
about your relationship to René? Are you as neurotic as him? not doing as badly as he is. But I have similar questions, doubts,
Assayas: Well, I’m not as nuts as he is. I’m a very well-behaved, and anxieties that I would not have defined the same way as when
well-educated person. I did the original Irma Vep. I go even deeper into the character
Scope: No fistfights with the actors? of René in this version because he is haunted by the ghosts of his
Assayas: No fistfights on my set. In many ways I am the op- past. I care about him. It’s not just that I identify with him here
posite of René Vidal, in the sense that I want people to be happy and there, or that here and there it’s actually me speaking; some-
on my set. The difference between independent and commercial times it’s not me speaking at all. We have a closer bond, in a way,
filmmaking is that at least independent filmmaking strives to be a because I love and care for him.
pleasurable process. People are happy and proud to be doing what Scope: It’s hard not to love Vincent Macaigne.
they’re doing. There is a sense of collective passion to creating Assayas: What Vincent does is remarkable. He gives René such
something of meaning. For me, the experience of making a movie humanity, tenderness, and kindness on top of all his emotional
has to be understood in terms of the pleasure it provides—to the mayhem. I’m grateful. He’s the person who helped me make sense
third assistant director, the prop guy, the driver, everybody has to of the whole thing.

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Tv or Not TV | By Kate Rennebohm

Finding Fielder
The Rehearsal

Nathan Fielder’s newest television show, The Rehearsal—which concert with actors playing the participants’ friends and family, on
was renewed for a second season at the recent close of its dizzying perfectly reproduced sets that, in a running gag, Fielder and Co. can’t
six-episode run on HBO—is a true comedy, in the sense that it’s re- get enough of spending HBO’s money on.
ally a tragedy. A deeply funny show wrapped around a startling core Fielder’s “Nathan” here is also something of a caricature of those
of sadness, The Rehearsal sets its sights on the tangled notion that directors who have populated the history of cinéma vérité films and
the more we instrumentalize or attempt to control the world, the re-enactment documentaries (think Rouch, Morris, Oppenheimer,
more the reality of that world and those in it seems to escape us. This etc.), with their faith in the power of strange, social-psychology-
is not a novel concern: historians and philosophers have long ar- experiment-esque prompts and the camera’s presence to produce
gued over whether reality’s recession, as the flip side of individuals’ truths that would not emerge otherwise. The Rehearsal is, to an ad-
growing alienation from lived experience, dates from the Industrial mirable degree, concerned with the tension at the heart of such films:
Revolution, the Reformation, or some other, earlier event. But The the contradiction between the profound wish for a reality that would
Rehearsal’s dizzyingly sharp take on the issue reveals the extremi- seem to ground us in the world—that is, for spontaneity, novelty, and
ty and particularly of the problem in the contemporary moment, unpredictability—and the control, manipulation, and stage-setting
shaped as it is by a profusion of instrumentalizations so simulta- needed to produce the scenarios that furnish such authenticity.
neously minute and expansive that we don’t even wonder anymore In a rather brilliant move, Fielder and his co-writers Carrie
over the belief that everything—including ourselves—should fall un- Kemper and Eric Notarnicola—both alumni of Nathan for You
der our own totalizing control, and thus our totalizing responsibility, (while Notarnicola is also a key creative player in that other spiraling
and thus our totalizing guilt. investigation of reality TV, Tim Heidecker and Gregg Turkington’s
As in Fielder’s previous show, the cult hit Nathan for You (which On Cinema at the Cinema Cinematic Universe)—displace this prob-
ran from 2013 to 2017 on Comedy Central), such control is here per- lem from its usual, assumed location in the realm of metaphysics,
sonified in The Rehearsal’s central character, Fielder himself. While instead tying the show’s search for reality to Nathan’s continual at-
Fielder’s persona is a little calmer and looser this time around, the tempts at self-improvement. The genius at work here is that while
basic parts remain: “Nathan” is a megalomaniac who craves connec- Nathan’s quests to engineer his own humanity frequently let the
tion with others, but who can only ever relate to them as players to show invoke the kinds of moral lessons and emotional effects so ti-
be manipulated and directed in whatever outlandish scheme he’s dily applied to reality television narratives—as Nathan ruminates
currently concocting. Where Nathan for You had Fielder offering in voiceover about wanting to do the right thing, or how he’s gained
ludicrous plans to small business owners with the purported aim insight into another’s feelings—Fielder and team then immediately
of helping them survive their inevitable demise at the hands of cor- and consistently pull the rug out from under any such perception
porate America, The Rehearsal finds him offering others the chance of enlightenment, with Nathan proposing yet another obtuse and
to influence their own lives, in the same way that Nathan wants to manipulative plan in response. In other words, while The Rehearsal
manipulate his (and theirs): by “rehearsing” life events in advance, stakes its claim that, for better or worse, the question of authenticity
“writing” those events by enacting the scenarios dozens of times in (as a catch-all for what seems to be so painfully missing from con-

52
temporary life) and the question of modern subjectivity (or the way he eventually runs this rehearsal again so he can focus on Thomas’
we relate to contemporary life) cannot be separated, it does so with experience. Now, Nathan achieves surprisingly sympathetic insights
the full knowledge that neither can the latter realm be instrumental- into these would-be actors’ motivations for participating in the
ized to solve the former problem. show—he recounts (imagines) in voiceover Thomas’ love of being on
The gambit of filtering the moral quandaries of producing docu- camera and his wish to impress the showrunners—before “discov-
mentary film and reality TV through the character of Nathan also ering” that such motivations were later leveraged into pressuring
does something else for The Rehearsal: it lets the show get several the actors to sign releases without enough time to read or consider
steps ahead of the viewers and reviewers who have, rather predicta- their agreement.
bly, responded to it with (morally) panicky accusations that Fielder Certainly, this and similar sequences in the show read as a kind
is simply replicating the narcissism and cruelty the show purports of meta-acknowledgment from Fielder and his team that they know
to indict in the figure of Nathan, tricking and manipulating individ- manipulation is at the core of The Rehearsal’s enterprise, and that
uals into participating in extended jokes made at their expense, or this knowledge especially inculpates Fielder (while more obviously
harmfully leveraging their wish to be on television against them. But developing the extended gag that it would take anyone this much ef-
Fielder has come prepared for such eventualities by building a re- fort to come to such basic conclusions about another’s experience).
sponse to them within the show itself, with the incredible fourth ep- Ultimately, the show leaves it to the viewer to decide whether such
isode, “The Fielder Method”—which offers a stunning investigation culpability should cancel out the value of The Rehearsal’s revela-
into the ethics and power dynamics of cultivating performances and tions. Primary amongst these is the plain fact that Nathan is hardly
creating characters—being only the most obvious example. alone in his wish to—as per the show’s tagline—“reduce the uncer-
The episode sees Nathan attempting to understand a young man tainties of life.” If the overwhelming demand to make the future
named Thomas, a participant in an “acting class” he’s running in forecastable characterizes our economic era—where money is made
which Nathan has class members stalk strangers to extract and rep- not from the production of actual goods, but from the successful pre-
licate the reality of those strangers’ lives, all in the name of achiev- diction of future events—such a demand also saturates our current
ing total verisimilitude in their acting so they might properly per- relations to ourselves and others. With the show’s hyper-awareness
form in future rehearsals. Aiming to understand Thomas and his of this state of affairs, the various individuals participating in The
reticence in the face of this plan, Nathan creates a secondary, post- Rehearsal’s rehearsals become avatars in its withering appraisal of
facto rehearsal in which he “becomes” the actor. While Nathan first the emotional and moral fallout of our moment, permeated as it is by
uses his vantage as Thomas to focus solely on “himself”—that is, media representations of hyper-polished, focus-tested personalities
the actor playing Nathan—and how he’s perceived by his students, on the one hand, and an atmospheric terror at the thought of person-

53
ally falling on the wrong side of any issue or code of behaviour on the jecting a world, you are just as likely to create a world that hates you
other. Faced with such realities, who wouldn’t want a world where, as you are to create one that welcomes you). In the pilot episode, for
in Nathan’s words, “You can always press the reset button and example, an actor (K. Todd Freeman) playing the episode’s prima-
start over?” ry rehearser—a high-school teacher named Kor Skeete—suddenly
The Rehearsal reminds its audience of the hollowness of such a appears in a scene in the place of Kor and reams Nathan out for his
world—our world—throughout, dramatizing this most obviously in manipulation and abuse of Kor’s trust. This kind of articulate, dra-
an overarching plotline that has Nathan inserting himself into the matic response rebounds against the audience’s knowledge of Kor,
show’s second-episode rehearsal, in which a woman named Angela an individual who would be entirely unlikely to give such a detailed
agrees to rehearse raising a child. The plan? Have her move into and emotive speech, or, indeed, to initiate any conflict whatsoever.
her dream home in the country and look after a series of child ac- In other words, as critics wonder why Fielder doesn’t simply ask
tors who will age by 18 years over a few weeks. Unable to find her a The Rehearsal’s participants how they feel about their involvement
suitable “dream partner”—though the man who briefly agrees to try with the show, Fielder responds with a regular reminder that asking
rivals any of Nathan for You’s personages for sheerly jaw-dropping for something “deeper” than the participants’ face-value reactions
behaviour—Nathan asks if he can co-parent, confessing to the au- would only ever replicate the kinds of manipulations and fabrica-
dience that he wants the kind of connection this faux-family might tions structuring reality TV, with its scenes directed by producers
provide. And while Nathan’s ability to simply reset his created world and confessional booths filled with individuals reading their own
at will—a gasp-inducing moment late in “The Fielder Method” has unconscious reality TV scripts.
him erasing the teenage son he has sharply failed to parent in favour If The Rehearsal eschews such fictions of direct, omniscient
of a six-year-old version of the boy—will contribute to his (seeming- access to the interiority of others, leaving its audience members
ly) growing disenchantment with the rehearsals and their potential to read for the “internal” in the same way they must in daily life
to connect him to anything, Angela constitutes a fascinating wrench (though with the added benefit of the show’s externalizing psycho-
in the works from the moment she appears. dramas), it would neither be right to imply that the show settles on
Like most of the other individuals on the show, Angela resists the notion that all hope for authenticity and connection is doomed.
reductive categorization, with her competent and often warm de- If Angela’s refusals often force a confrontation with a reality be-
votion to her fake child interlaced with her confused biblical read- yond Nathan’s head, his eventual relationship with Remy—one of
ings, odd affect, and certainty that there are satanic conspiracies all the six-year-old actors playing his son—takes this reckoning to its
around. (As an aside, it’s worth wondering whether the default crit- furthest point. In The Rehearsal’s final episode, it’s revealed that
icism that Fielder’s shows mock players like Angela reflects some- the fatherless Remy has bonded to Fielder during filming, and that
thing else instead, which is an assumption that showing behaviour he’s struggling to let go of his “Pretend Daddy,” as the episode is ti-
that doesn’t conform to media-approved norms must be equivalent tled. Seemingly concerned, Nathan does what he can to help the
to mocking it; that is, such presumptions perhaps reveal more about child, but then disappears yet again into various re-enactments
the anemia of our spectrum of responses to those odd folk who pop- of his time with Remy, hoping to find where he went wrong. When
ulate reality—ourselves included—than it does about Fielder’s treat- this doesn’t alleviate Nathan’s sense of guilt, something new irrupts:
ment of them.) And yet, almost uniquely, Angela holds her ground he begins to play Remy’s mother in scenarios where no record-
with Nathan, refusing his (reasonable) child-rearing requests and ed event provides a script, looking after “Remy”—now played by a
his (less reasonable) erratic changes in plan while regularly calling wizened, professional nine-year-old—in the time leading up to the
out Fielder as a liar and manipulator. An early scene of her praying, show’s filming.
in which we hear her conspire with God to show Nathan that, de- These sequences culminate The Rehearsal’s tying of the broader
spite what they may believe, they are not the ones in control, cannily crises of the contemporary moment to the broken self, presenting
frames Angela as something like the real foil to Nathan’s plans for in its final moments a genuinely affecting scene of Nathan, now vul-
world domination—a framing played out especially in the fifth ep- nerable and compassionate, doing his best to comfort his weeping
isode, “Apocalypto,” where Nathan is himself reframed as subject son. That these scenes are so successful—Fielder’s performance is
entirely to the influence of a series of women in his life, thereby de- remarkable—would seem to have the show claiming that something
flating his claims to omnipotence. like healing is at work; that Nathan has changed, and the world has
Here, as throughout the show, when Nathan can’t get what he opened itself to him in turn (opaque confessions from Nathan about
wants from a situation, he retreats into a fabricated version of being Remy’s dad and not his mom aside). But then, one remembers
that scenario populated by actors. As The Rehearsal unfolds, the that this scene is as artificial and insulated as anything else in the
audience has to pay increased attention to catch when we’re see- show, leading to the question: is this The Rehearsal (or Nathan) ac-
ing Nathan interact with Angela in the actual (fake) house, and cepting the hurt at the heart of human limitation, or is this yet an-
when we’re seeing him interact with Angela’s lookalike performer, other cynical reminder that all is artifice, and that the production of
drawn from the Fielder Method acting class, in a fake (fake) house, genuine feeling here is just that—a product made for an audience,
the seamless substitutions just one of the many impressive feats of eager to buy in? With this high-wire act of unbalancing sustained to
The Rehearsal’s remarkable editors. Often, these substituted actors its final moments, the show’s final episode leaves you wondering not
make eloquent speeches, perfectly articulating “their” feelings as (or not only) what is real in The Rehearsal, but why you so badly need
they confront Nathan (the show is careful to emphasize that, in pro- to know.

54
 Global Discoveries on DVD | By Jonathan Rosenbaum

Bologna’s Bounty
There appears to be a consensus that this (Zagreb-based Zora Dirnbach) who lived
year’s Il Cinema Ritrovato in Bologna was ex- through it and easily justifying all its melo-
ceptionally rich—so much so that I concluded dramatic punctuations, including its Dante-
that my next column in these pages could be derived title. The film recounts the experience
devoted to some of its riches, most of which of a young Jewish college student who gets
are already available on DVD or Blu-ray in one hastily married to a non-Jewish classmate in
form or another. The most notable exceptions, a friendly family after seeing her own family
at least among the newer films shown—Jean- shipped off to the death camps, and then re-
Baptiste Péretié’s 2021 Jacques Tati, tombé de mains cloistered in the family’s apartment for
la lune (not only the best documentary about fear of being recognized by Croatian police on
Tati to date, but the only one to understand the city’s streets. Many other plot complica-
the basic fact that Tati essentially wrote his tions follow—including the fake married cou-
scripts with his body), and Mitra Farahani’s ple falling in love with one another—and the
startling À vendredi, Robinson, a staged in- narrative momentum is brilliantly sustained.
ternet encounter between two nonagenarian The Trunks of Mr. O.F, a consistently inven-
New Wave pioneers, Jean-Luc Godard and tive and hilarious satirical farce that suggests
Ebrahim Golestan, that encompasses their an early René Clair talkie in German, features
dialectically contrasting self-portraits—will a chubby, M-era Peter Lorre, before he went to
hopefully become available in the near future, England and worked for Hitchcock, but it’s the
at which point their minor limitations (e.g., script and direction more than the star that
Péretié minimalizing the radicalism of Tati’s impressed me the most. A Depression come-
Parade [1974], Farahani over-maximalizing dy that charts the economic boom overtaking
the radicalism of Godard in her own transgres- a nondescript German village after 13 trunks
sive editing patterns) can also be discussed. for a future guest arrives at its only inn, which
For the others, let me start by noting that quickly transforms itself into a luxury hotel,
two of my favourite Bologna discoveries are this has the sort of quirky, acerbic wit and
both available from Rarefilmsandmore.com originality that one finds in many of the best
for $13.99 US apiece: France Štiglic’s 1960 early talkies, making it a musical in spirit if not
The Ninth Circle (shown in Mina Radović’s in fact. (Another Bologna program, and one
excellent Yugoslav program) and Alexis that I lamentably missed entirely, was in fact
Granowsky’s 1931 The Trunks of Mr. O.F. devoted to early German musicals.)
(which screened in Alexander Horwath’s no For a superb Lorre performance—the sub-
less discerning Peter Lorre retrospective). tlest and most nuanced of his that I’ve recalled
Reportedly the first Yugoslav feature ever seeing, in contrast to his memorable histri-
nominated for an Oscar, though seemingly onics in M (1931)—I can recommend Robert
cut by about five minutes in most circulating Florey’s The Face Behind the Mask (1941),
copies (including the Rarefilms version), The available both on DVD and on a much prici-
Ninth Circle is the most powerful and gripping er Blu-ray. Lorre must have regarded his role
fiction feature about the Jewish Holocaust here as a rare technical challenge: he plays an
that I’ve seen, written by a Jewish woman immigrant to the US whose face, hideously

55
mutilated by fire, is mostly hidden behind a same story in separate genres (the former a interesting characters or stories, at least not
form-fitting mask. How Lorre meets that chal- globetrotting noir with James Mason, the lat- in relation to the real world.
lenge is every bit as awesome as what Charles ter an especially fetching Western with Joel A screening of a restored early Carl Dreyer
Laughton does with his eponymous character McCrea and evocations of Mark Twain’s Huck feature, Love One Another (1922), in Mariann
in Robert Siodmak’s 1944 The Suspect (availa- and Tom). It was also because the themat- Lewinsky and Karl Wratschko’s 1922 program
ble on an affordable Blu-ray), which was justly ic continuity traced by Kehr—an existential (with a superb piano and harp accompani-
praised by Simon Callow (in his fine biogra- treatment of destiny and the consequences ment) afforded me my first look at the film
phy of the actor) for Laughton’s performative of decisions—can be found not only in those where I could both follow the extremely com-
inflections. Admittedly, Siodmak is a much two films, as well as in the exciting visuals of plicated plot and appreciate what was most
better director than Florey, but for someone Fregonese’s 1951 Val Lewton Western Apache Dreyeresque about it, such as its historical
like me who defines the art of cinema as some- Drums (misdescribed by Manny Farber as the authenticity as well as its political incorrect-
thing that isn’t necessarily restricted to
mise “least” of the Lewtonproduced features, a ness regarding both the Russian Revolution
en scène, The Face Behind the Mask is a reve- judgment that would be more aptly assigned to and the persecution of Jews. (Intolerance
lation. (It had the same effect on film scholar the 1944 films Mademoiselle Fifi or Youth Runs here isn’t the exclusive property of non-Jews
Noa Steimatsky, who told me she wished she’d Wild), but also in Seven Thunders (1957, avail- and non-revolutionaries.) This version was
seen it before writing her 2017 book The Face able on DVD) and especially in my favourite in scanned from the original nitrate print dis-
on Film.) the bunch that I saw: The Raid (1954), a Van covered in 2005 with the help of Bernard
On the other hand, the wonderful Hugo Heflin Civil War Western with Lee Marvin as Eisenschitz (for those who can follow unsub-
Fregonese retrospective put together by Dave one of the heavies, available on a 20th Century titled French, Eisenschitz’s impressive lec-
Kehr and Ehsan Khoshbakht at Il Cinema Fox Cinema Archives DVD. For the record, ture on Dreyer at the Cinémathèque française
Ritrovato reawakened and satisfied all my though, the favourite among most of the oth- is available at vimeo.com/191944028). The
auteurist reflexes. This wasn’t only because er Fregonese-watchers I spoke with was the Danish Film Archive released an earlier and
the first two Fregonese films I saw in Bologna extravagant, almost operatic 1954 Edgar G. shorter restoration some time ago, along with
for the first time: One-Way Street (alas, un- Robinson gangster pic Black Tuesday (1954, Dreyer’s The Bride of Glomdal (1926), on a PAL
available) and Saddle Tramp (available on a available on DVD but only in a lousy print), but Blu-ray for $40, but I hope this more compre-
PAL Italian DVD, as Vagabondo a Cavallo), I agreed with Erika Balsom’s observation that hensive version will also become more widely
both from 1950, which tell two versions of the pure good and pure evil don’t generally yield available, ideally with same piano-and-harp

56
score. (However, given Criterion’s recent ad-
diction to political correctness—which has al-
ready ruled out both Orson Welles’ The Other
Side of the Wind [2018] and Abbas Kiarostami’s
10 [2002] as possible releases—I suspect it
may have to be on another label.)
The Museum of Modern Art’s recent res-
toration of Erich von Stroheim’s Foolish
Wives (1922), shown in Bologna’s Piazza with
a full orchestral score, doesn’t qualify as a
“discovery” for me in the same way as Love
One Another (apart from the effective uses
of colour in the film’s climactic fire), because
I’m still sorting out what I think of this new
version and how it compares to the earlier
version assembled by Arthur Lenning that’s
available on a Kino Lorber Blu-ray. Obviously,
I’ll have to see it again, and another digital re-
lease would clearly facilitate this. Meanwhile,
I continue to regard Stroheim’s performance
in every version of Foolish Wives that I’ve seen
as his most definitive and fascinating achieve-
ment as an actor—above all in his “hiding in
plain sight” (like Poe’s purloined letter) as an
imposter playing an imposter, thereby demon-
strating that Stroheim, like Welles, was his
own harshest critic.
This leads me to cite another discovery I
made in Bologna, albeit a relatively minor one:
Gregory Ratoff’s 1940 I Was an Adventuress
(available on a pricey Blu-ray), starring
Vera Zorina in the title role, and co-starring
Stroheim and Peter Lorre as her accomplices.
(This diverting romp was shown as part of the
Lorre retrospective.) Reportedly, the two of
them were friends in real life; on the evidence
of this film, they certainly knew how to play
well together.
P.S. Although I haven’t yet seen Execution
in Autumn (1972), directed by Lee Hsing (who
died last year at age 91), I can nevertheless
recommend the Masters of Cinema Blu-ray
of the film to readers with region B players
for the huge historical contribution of Tony
Rayns’ exhaustive 44-minute introduction,
which explains in detail why this Confucian
melodrama illustrates the transition between
what Rayns describes as the “wasteland” of
earlier Taiwanese cinema and the subsequent
New Wave of Hou Hsiao-hsien, Edward Yang,
Tsai Ming-liang, and others. It’s the sort of
cross-referential, in-depth analysis that I hav-
en’t encountered elsewhere, either in print or
on other digital releases.

57
Deaths of Cinema | By Celluloid Liberation Front

Peter Brook
Flickers of Life

“Thank God our art doesn’t last. At least we’re not adding more junk life in a grand-angular premonition of the revolts that would rejuve-
to the museums. Yesterday’s performance is by now a failure. If we nate the world a year later.
accept this, we can always start again from scratch.” Born in London to Jewish immigrants from Russia, Brook ini-
—Peter Brook tially thought the seventh art to be his artform of choice. Theatre,
he felt in his university days, was just “a dreary and dying precur-
sor of cinema”: he almost got kicked out of Oxford for neglecting
his academic duties and dedicating all his energies and time to the
Peter Brook’s dalliance with cinema may have been only peripheral University Film Society, which he founded in 1943. Brook’s cine-
compared to his absorbing, existential involvement with the theatre, matic ambitions ended abruptly when, having found employment
but the fruits it bore should not be consigned to oblivion. Limited, in advertisement after graduating, he was fired for having directed
uneven, and ultimately irreducible to any single cinematic tradition, a soap commercial in the style of Citizen Kane (1941). His feature
the films directed by Brook do not even appear as the organic whole debut eventually came in 1953 with The Beggar’s Opera—an adap-
of an authorial vision. Each film is in fact a distinguished creation, tation of John Gay’s 18th-century opera starring Laurence Olivier,
even when adapted from a play he had previously staged. His cine- Hugh Griffith, and Dorothy Tutin—but it was arguably Moderato
matic version of King Lear (1970), for instance, was made eight years Cantabile (1960), starring Jeanne Moreau and Jean-Paul Belmondo,
after he staged the play, and, by the director’s own admission, the that showed Brook’s uniquely deconstructive abilities behind
film bore no iconographic resemblance to its theatrical prototype. the camera.
Even when adhering, out of necessity, to the spatial limitations of his Adapted from the novel by Marguerite Duras—of which Brook
theatrical sources, onscreen Brook was able to cinematically over- appreciatively remarked that it “made no statement, it proved no
come “the deadliness of the filmed play.” point”—Moderato Cantabile is a passive romance built around the
Such is the case with Brook’s transmutation of Peter Weiss’ The reconstruction of what was then euphemistically called a “crime of
Persecution and Assassination of Jean-Paul Marat as Performed by the passion,” but is today more appropriately referred to as femicide.
Inmates of the Asylum of Charenton Under the Direction of the Marquis Anne (Moreau) meets Chauvin (Belmondo) at a murder scene,
de Sade, for which David Picker, the then-head of United Artists, of- and the two strike up an ambiguous relationship that the direc-
fered Brook and producer Michael Birkett $250,000 to adapt into a tor leaves undefined. Married to a wealthy businessman, Anne
film, the only condition being that it had to be delivered on time. With divides her days between her son’s piano lessons and sheer bore-
a limited budget and only 15 days to complete the shoot, Brook had nei- dom. Chauvin is, for lack of a better alternative, a welcome distrac-
ther the time nor the means to exceed the material restrictions of the tion—though it’s not so much attraction that draws them together
stage, except through cinematography. “With three, sometimes four as a morbid projection on the murder that occasioned their first
cameras working non-stop, we covered the production like a boxing encounter. Shot and set in the small port city of Blaye in winter,
match,” Brook later reminisced of his Marat/Sade (1967); “the camer- far from the scenic boulevards of the French capital, the film feels
as advanced and retreated, twisted and whirled, trying to behave like like a contrapuntal pairing-down of the nouvelle vague’s juvenile
what goes on in a spectator’s head.” Though the production was filmed excesses. In line with Brook’s theatrical research, the film pursues
in a theatrical space, Brook’s direction expansively captures the revo- complexity through simplicity: unlike some of the French films
lutionary irresponsibility of the madmen who want things to change of that period which hid their poverty of ideas behind stylistic ex-
even if they don’t know exactly how, Weiss’ play coming to palpable travagance, Moderato Cantabile is almost held back, subdued on

58
   
  

the level of spectacle but immeasurably generative when it comes Cannes allegedly turned down due its “controversial” nature, pro-
to evocation. vides a semi-fictional account of the cultural ferment that the anti-war
Brook’s next and possibly most well-known film, Lord of the Flies movement both fed and ignited. The film disappeared shortly after its
(1963), presented him with the unpleasant realities of big(ger) pro- premiere in 1968, superseded by political events that both lived up to
ductions, and would remind him of the advice Orson Welles once and surpassed the outrage Brook had channelled in his work. (It was
gave him: “Never work with a producer at the top of his success.” restored in 2012, under the director’s supervision.) Though one could
(Brook himself later summed up the experience of making the film in argue that all of Brook’s oeuvre is profoundly political, this is possi-
these terms: “If Golding’s book is a potted history of man, so the sto- bly its only truly militant manifestation. But then again, Tell Me Lies
ry of the making of the film is like a condensed history of the cinema, is also a film that is able to self-critically distance itself from the ba-
throwing up all the snares, temptations, and heartbreaks of the dif- nality of dogmatic commitment in order to acutely ponder the pow-
ferent levels of production.”) Having initially approached his friend er(lessness) of images. For a master of theatre who abhorred the very
Sam Spiegel, fresh off the triumph of Lawrence of Arabia (1962), with idea of teaching (“I don’t teach, I share,” Brook once told a perplexed
a proposal to produce an adaptation of William Golding’s book—a Charlie Rose), the possible site of political intervention was far more
project that was dear to his heart—Brook embarked on a troubled vast than the one political leaders often confine themselves to. Doubt
first attempt that resulted in a six-hour-long script the producers rather than affirmation, contradiction over certainty is what animat-
refused to film. Subsequently, with the help of Lewis Allen and Dana ed Brook’s artistic research, in film as well as theatre.
Hodgdon, who had just financed Shirley Clarke’s The Connection It was never the final result but rather the journey to get to it
(1961), Brook shot Flies on an island off the coast of Puerto Rico with that interested Brook, which makes his interest in the work of
very limited means and a budget far smaller than the one that had Gyorgy Ivanovich Gurdjieff perfectly pertinent. The Armenian
originally been planned. Nevertheless, Brook’s film could be read mystic stressed the importance of searching for rather than finding
as having benefited from its material restraints, its desolate min- “truth,” and his philosophy consisted of an eclectic mix of knowledge
imalism arguably better evoking the primal cruelty at the heart of drawn from orthodox monks, Sufis, Uzbek forgers, fakirs, British
Golding’s story than a glossier production with higher production sailors, and any other savant he’d met in his intrepid life. Brook’s
values would have done. cinematographic adaptation of Gurdjieff’s pyrotechnic memoirs,
Two years before the Tet Offensive in January 1968 would change Meetings with Remarkable Men (1979), is a secular homage to the
the course of the Vietnam War and inaugurate a most explosive year, metaphysics of terrestrial research. Like Gurdjieff, Brook found
Brook staged for the Royal Shakespeare Company an experimental wisdom in simplicity, which is why his lifelong artistic pursuit was
anti-war play, US, which Peter Whitehead immortalized in his doc- aimed at stripping expression and creativity away from the burden
umentary Benefit of the Doubt (1967); a year later, Brook made a film of artifice—to collapse the fabricated distance between art and life,
not so much about the making of that play, but on the sociopolitical and share “the need to be in a new and intimate relationship with
circumstances under which it was made. Tell Me Lies (1968), which one’s fellow men.”

59
Books | By Phil Coldiron

British Sounds
On The Afterimage Reader

Appearing at charmingly irregular intervals between 1970 and 1987, And yet, certain themes emerge with enough coherence to warrant
the 13 volumes of Afterimage comprise an odd, heterodox entry in the risk of articulation. Ian Christie, an editor from no. 7 through no.
the history of the “theoretical turn” in film criticism. Less dogmat- 13—he worked under the pseudonym Guy L’éclaire, on account of a
ic than their French counterparts (both literal and spiritual), more conflict of interest with his employer, the BFI, a partial funder of the
playful than the heady severity often found in Artforum and October, magazine—tidily sums up the strain of sensibility I’ll focus on for the
this little magazine—it measured roughly 8” by 6”—brought together remainder of this review when, in his brief afterword to the Reader,
a promiscuous array of texts in general sympathy with a modernist he identifies the “exploration of ‘meta-cinema’” as a signal concern.
sensibility that sought to reconcile the tension between the mo- Drawn as it was, quite explicitly, from Hollis Frampton’s notion of
ment’s formal and political avant-gardes. “metahistory,” we are free to read this “meta-cinema” as indicating
In practice, this meant a purview stretching from the dawn of the that the magazine was concerned with “identifying a tradition”—or,
medium to its latest arrivals, all taken up with admirable curiosity as the sentence continues, “a coherent wieldy set of discrete mon-
and, for the most part, a lightly worn seriousness. Independently uments”—that might make some sense of the thing called cinema,
published and released in runs between 500 and 1,500 copies, the which even within its first century was already a historical night-
magazine has remained relatively obscure; while the British distrib- mare. Understood as such, the art called “film” converges in a sin-
utor Lux has continued to occasionally sell original editions, and gle, infinite, and impossibly unwieldy unity which is, for all practical
while a number of its more famous entries have gone on to be widely purposes, coterminous with nothing less than all knowledge. Well,
anthologized and reprinted, I’ve never personally seen an issue in fuck. Still, the stakes here are high enough to be freeing in their way.
the flesh. Given this, regarding The Visible Press’ new collection, The Frampton, horny as ever, suggested that the only recourse was to
Afterimage Reader, I can offer this endorsement, slightly modified stay up all night. The relatively sober British minds of Afterimage
from one of its best entries: Highly recommended! Not to be missed. would turn this giddy and hallucinatory intellectual framework to-
Essential reading. wards somewhat more practical ends, elaborating a model for un-
Having gotten that out of the way, the matter of dealing with what derstanding the vast field of image production which clarifies the
Afterimage, as a collective intervention in the history of cinema, fi- relay between formal and political intelligence, allowing for fleeting
nally was is something of a trickier situation. Editor Mark Webber’s glimpses of how a modernist cinema not doomed to failure might
introduction to the volume offers a thorough account of the maga- appear. In an effort to explain a project which remains hopeless-
zine’s context, both intellectual and historical, so I feel comfortable ly abstract when unmoored from specific instances, I’ll spend the
in foregoing a rehearsal of the names of various contemporaries and rest of this piece looking first at the actual arguments put forth in
sources of funding. Meanwhile, the Reader, running past 300 pages, Afterimage, before attempting to test them against current activity
presents perhaps less than a quarter of the magazine’s entirety, mak- in the field. The Eisensteinian section headings, I note, are drawn
ing it hazardous to offer anything like conclusive statements. from the planned, but unpublished, issue no. 14.

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 The Old Fernando Solanas, Octavio Getino, and Julio García Espinosa (none
of which are included in the Reader, on account of their broad avail-
For all its idiosyncrasies, Afterimage was acutely a product of its ability elsewhere). It also precipitated what is, so far as I’m aware,
time. While its striking design—rather than frame enlargements, the the most serious Anglophone engagement with the films of Godard’s
magazine favoured a mix of surrealist collage and stark graphic il- Maoist period. Beyond Wollen’s “Counter Cinema” (a first step in the
lustration—was drawn directly from the work of George Manciunas direction of the ideas that would be fleshed out a few years later in
for Film Culture and its related publications, it also fits comfortably his canonical “The Two Avant-Gardes”), there were also essays by
alongside the emergent aesthetics of early British punk. Its demo- Peter Sainsbury and Noël Burch (neither included in the Reader), as
graphics, in terms of both authors and subjects, is lamentably white well as a series of short texts by Godard himself, including the bark-
and male: the magazine published work by and about only a handful ing “What Is To Be Done?,” a set of ordered statements that is now
of women, and nothing by or about anyone outside of Europe and the most widely known for the phrase derived from a combination of
Americas (its engagement with the cinema of the Soviet Union was, statements 1 and 2: “It is not enough to make political films, we must
admittedly, expansive, though it was hardly alone in this). make films politically.”
The magazine’s uniqueness emerges most evidently in terms of As this militancy waned, an interest in ideological critique—large-
tone and taste. On both fronts, it can be read as charting a general ly oriented by the work of Cahiers between 1968 and 1974, and more
arc from the post-’68 stridency of the early issues to a looser, less conventionally associated with the British academic journal Screen—
prescriptive exploration of cinema’s capacity to function equally as a came to the fore. This would more or less be modulated across the
means of picturing the world and enquiring into it. This initial ener- magazine’s last ten issues, ranging from an initial concern with semi-
gy can on some level be accounted for by the fact that the magazine otics to later, more baroque expression via filmmakers as disparate
was born out of the highly politicized atmosphere at the University as Jean Epstein, Raúl Ruiz, Derek Jarman, and the Brothers Quay. As
of Essex, where editor Simon Field studied; he makes a point of re- Sainsbury puts it in his “Editorial: For a New Cinema,” an overview
minding readers in his introduction that it was one of the locations of issue no. 4 which doubles as a remarkable theoretical précis, “The
Jean-Luc Godard chose for 1970’s British Sounds (itself the subject cinema is an epistemological one.” The results are not always grati-
of a lengthy essay here by Peter Wollen). fying: Burch and Jorge Dana’s “Propositions” arrives at the strange
In practice, this meant a sustained engagement in the first and middle ground between Jean-Louis Comolli and Jean Narboni’s
third issues with the militant cinema of Latin and South America, in- “Cinema/Ideology/Criticism” (from which it borrows a taxonomy of
cluding reports on various trends in leftist newsreel filmmaking and films assigned to lettered categories based on the relationship they
the first translations into English of major texts by Glauber Rocha, manifest between form and ideology) and Manny Farber’s “White

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Elephant Art vs. Termite Art” (Burch/Dana’s exhaustive disman-
tling of Citizen Kane [1941] is effectively a politicized elaboration
of the former category), while being drastically more long-winded
than the French text and far less entertaining than the American
one. Meanwhile, thorough analysis of the new animation of the ’80s
now seems simply a failure of taste, one which the subtlety of Paul
Hammonds’ exegesis of the Quays can’t overcome.
It is perhaps not an accident that the two examples of relative fail-
ure that I’ve chosen here are both rare instances of Afterimage deal-
ing with what can broadly be termed commercially viable narrative
cinema. At its core, its best, the magazine’s concern was with the pos-
sibility that the modes of filmmaking deemed aberrant by the var-
ious reigning institutions, whether the existing distribution model
or the academics of Screen, might finally be moved from the margins
to the centre. In its way, it’s an old Soviet dream—a return to the
moment of Vitebsk, of the Cinetrain, of Kino-Pravda, of Eisenstein
before he left for Mexico. Metahistory might be the watchword, but
it can’t transpire in isolation; a new audience would need to be built.
As such, the activity of Afterimage was at its most fruitful along
two intimately related tracks. On the one hand, many of the issues,
such as no. 10 (on Ruiz) and no. 11 (on Michael Snow), were conceived
to function as promotional materials for screening series or retro-
spectives (many of the individuals involved with Afterimage were
also directly associated with independent venues, such as The Other
Cinema). On the other hand, this meant that the writing, which often
dealt with deeply challenging work, needed to be both clear and en-
joyable, a quality that sets the magazine apart from far too many of
its peers. Michael O’Pray’s “Framing Snow,” for example, deftly sum-
marizes three approaches to Snow’s work—by the filmmakers Peter
Gidal and Malcolm Le Grice, and the academic Stephen Heath—glid-
ing past any danger of being mired in the narcissism of small differ- sumption becomes intensely moving in the context of a filmmaker
ences to arrive at a composite view that not only provides a useful whose work was aimed at dismantling the homophobic moralism
condensation of how Snow’s work could be seen at one moment in that would demand such privacy in the first place. This, too, is near
history, but also illuminates what these views betrayed regarding the the heart of Afterimage: the understanding that the cinema, as the
various relationships to narrative being explored, more or less con- century’s grand (and maybe only) public art, involves the hyperbol-
sciously, by a trio of thinkers at the forefront of British film culture ically complex navigation of relationships between the group and
during the ’70s. the individual.
While this particular example is admittedly a rather dry, refined The Reader’s single best entry, and one of the more remarkable
delight, others are, quite simply, a hoot. Take, for example, the long pieces of film criticism I’ve read in some time, brings together near-
interview with Frampton, which includes a rapturous, page-long ac- ly every strand of the Afterimage project that I’ve mentioned so far
count of his first time eating psilocybin mushrooms (the magazine into 27 pages of madcap prose, as delirious as it is erudite. A kind of
also reprinted his metahistorical fiction “A Stipulation of Terms from reading of films by Guy Sherwin, Steve Farrer, and Lis Rhodes, Deke
Maternal Hopi,” a text whose concluding glossary of terms includes, Dusinberre’s “See Real Images!” brings together the three pillars of
as entry number 47, “]H[ ]F[ = The fungus Stropharia cubensis”). Afterimagism—semiotically inflected close formal analysis, artists
Or consider O’Pray’s deadpan discussion, in the midst of a deeply felt discussing their work (whether in written text or interview), and
Freudian reading of the films of his friend Derek Jarman, of the nas- specific historical contexts—and sets them spinning with a wit fast
cent history of amateur pornography as essential to understanding enough to become genuinely disorienting. Real interviews bleed into
the artist’s early Super 8 work, a passage which includes the indelible fictional anecdotes, “straight” description is sequestered in small
sentence, “The use made of media like Super 8 and video for private black boxes inset along the edges of the page. Farrer’s 10 Drawings
sex films is an unknown quantity.” is discussed chiefly through wildly indulgent interpretations drawn
Beyond the sheer pleasure one might take in either of these cas- between the graphic drawings which comprise the base of the film’s
es, both also point to a rich personal connection: Frampton’s expe- material and a series of ten couplets presented as Farrer’s own,
rience with mushrooms appears to have clarified the expansiveness though they are in fact of Dusinberre’s devising. (While the text
of thought which would shape his unfinished life’s work, Magellan, makes no admission of its fabrications, Dusinberre does clarify
while O’Pray’s discussion of images made for purely private con- what’s what in a newly written afterword. In the case of the poems,

62
however, a certain type of reader might have already noticed that that’s capable of finding an exit from the ideological givens of the
each rhymes the cadence of the opening of one of Pound’s Cantos— current social order. I’m speaking of the fact that each of us—and I
e.g., “And then went down to the ship, / Set keel to breakers, forth do think that this applies at something near a global level, though
on the godly sea, and” becomes “And then bent down to her lip, / obviously at varying degrees and with widely varying pernicious-
Yet kneeled to make her, sport on bodily me, and”). ness of implications—is now a little factory of metadata. How, when
Given that, in the world of the text, Sherwin, Farrer, and Rhodes this is the case, can we avoid seeing the world as something which is
all seem to be close enough with Dusinberre to find themselves sit- constantly dissolving into objects (that is, images, if you like), each
ting around chatting in his living room, at least one possible vantage of which is both obliged to be meaningful in the abstract and casti-
on “See Real Images!” is to view it as a model for navigating the dy- gated, time and again, for being too meaningful, for refusing to settle
namic of the demands of criticism for objectivity with the reality of down into one comfortable articulation?
working side by side with friends in the hope of bringing about a new, This dynamic of obligation and excess is the level on which a con-
enduring culture. Highly recommended! Not to be missed. Essential temporary modernism would have to operate. We have plenty of
viewing. But then, this might just be another fiction. work today that is hugely accomplished, beautiful, witty, expansive,
galvanizing, but little to none that seems to me to exemplify the for-
The New mal thinking that might make our art deeply meaningful in the sense
that I’m speaking of here. This is why I write. As Frampton might
It is, I expect, obvious enough why this last point would be appeal- have said: u up?
ing to me as someone who is generally concerned with work that
exists in at least some degree of opposition to the various corporate
institutions which go on controlling the vast majority of contempo-
rary mainstream cinema (film festivals, of course, being by no means
exempt from this category). But while a detailed discussion of those
dynamics will have to wait, I’d like to close this review by turning to
the present and attempting to give an overview of how the current
landscape of rough analogues to the work that Afterimage champi-
oned can be seen through the intellectual lenses it provides.
By the horrifyingly ungainly phrase “current landscape of rough
analogues to the work that Afterimage championed,” I mean gener-
ally work which exhibits at least some opposition to the narrative
transparency which remains the defining feature of not only the en-
tirety of the output of Hollywood (inclusive of any and all ostensible
“disruptors in the media space”), but also of the overwhelming ma-
jority of both well-regarded festival titles and “artists’ film and vid-
eo” of the sort which now regularly fills the halls of museums and the
booths of art fairs. None of this work wants for exegesis, and if the
quality it generally receives is slapdash, I can only say that it seems
perfectly well earned.
The miniscule percentage of contemporary work that this leaves
us with is, I imagine, roughly equivalent to what the writers at
Afterimage saw before them; I see no reason to think that the situ-
ation has markedly improved or degraded. What is distinct is that,
rather than a situation in which serious, sophisticated work was
obliged to work on its form as film—a category which, however con-
tested, could still be comfortably regarded as art, and thus distinct in
fundamental ways from the modes of relation which one employed
in the non-art hours of the day—we now find ourselves in a situation
where the line between art and non-art is vanishingly thin. Walter
Benjamin, we might remember, had a name for this: fascism. Now, if
we go along with him that the communist response to this is to polit-
icize art, it would seem the conventional response occurs only on the
level of content, an easy, reactionary road to so many sad spectacles.
In practice, we’re left with a real issue regarding the very idea of
“metahistory”—of the notion that an appropriately rigorous and
playful relationship between past and present, an appropriately
precise understanding of the evolution of forms, can lead us to work

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Film/Art | By Antoine Thirion

Evidence Visible
from a Distance
Tacita Dean on Fata Morgana

In The Green Ray (2001), British artist Tacita Dean famously man- able object is some sort of lamp pole or antenna blinking on an
aged to capture on 16mm film the fleeting light that the sun leaves orange sky. But what seems at first glance to be clouds or hills are
behind right at the moment when it disappears from the horizon. pure mirages resulting from specific atmospheric conditions, the
And, because a digital camera used by others at the same time, same complex natural phenomena that have contributed in his-
on the same beach, was unable to capture it, her film proves two tory to the illusion of distant land features—the Fata Morgana,
things: one, that the green ray, despite being missed by almost all named after the Arthurian sorceress Morgan le Fay.
who try and see it, is not a legend; two, that only film can capture With daylight, stranger visions occur at the edge of the ground
it. But the evidence is elusive, as Éric Rohmer found out while and the mountains. Blurry vehicles seem to be moving steadily
shooting Le rayon vert (1986), eventually choosing to underline like cursors on the horizon axis, some of them suddenly appear-
through slow motion and heavy colour correction the phenome- ing out of nowhere or disappearing in the middle of the frame.
na he had been desperate to obtain for seven months (which was (Werner Herzog, while filming his Fata Morgana [1971]—a
eventually captured by cinematographer Philippe Demard in the “science-fiction elegy about demented colonialism” shaped like
Canary Islands). Since no single frame actually shows the colour a cosmogonic poem and narrated by Lotte Eisner—was also de-
green in Dean’s film, and it only seems to be produced by the rap- ceived by the appearance of a van driving in the Sahara Desert,
id succession of frames in the projector, a button allows visitors only to realize that this vehicle did not exist.) Buildings similarly
to rerun the two-minute reel to convince themselves it actually vanish in the blink of an eye, and, when a crow lands on the bar-
happened. But this is at the expense of the film itself, as the image ren soil, one is reminded that such visions used to lure people into
slowly fades out with each repeated viewing, its transient nature death. Each new frame brings forth painterly qualities, surfaces
akin to the elusiveness of the natural phenomenon. that range from crusty to fluid, as if colour was either fixed or un-
A similar analogy between cinema and nature’s glorious vi- fixed on a constantly changing acetate layer.
sions seems to be celebrated in Dean’s dazzling Fata Morgana, In Paris, the film was installed in a notoriously difficult-to-
a 22-minute 16mm film comprising approximately 25 shots, handle space in the gallery’s basement, whose pointed arches
which premieres in the Wavelengths section at the Toronto entirely covered with red bricks felt particularly attuned to the
International Film Festival in September after being shown at ochre palette of the film. A few chairs were arranged in an arc in
Marian Goodman’s Paris gallery this summer. The film starts with front of the projector, and the sense of being alongside it in front
the day breaking over salt flats in Utah, where the only recogniz- of fleeting images pointed to the performative nature of film.

64
Seated between the roaring projector and Western American Tacita Dean: Well, I was filming something else in Utah, in the
landscapes producing their own fleeting images rising from the Bonneville Salt Flats, and you have to understand that I’m some-
flat, white surface of a salt desert, I couldn’t help but take it as an one who has always been very aware of Fata Morgana and always
allegory of film. But this is perhaps too heavy-handed for such a wanted to film one. I imagined and fabricated one in my print of
subtle celebration of cinema. As Dean wrote in a 2015 article in Quarantania (2018), for example. So, I’ve done a little bit of re-
Artforum, when she was advocating for the survival of film with search historically on that. When we were there, I started to no-
the savefilm.org platform, it’s undoubtedly more sincere to realize tice it in the distance. It was February and it was extremely cold.
that, as Christopher Nolan (who campaigned alongside her) told We were up before dawn, and as soon as the sun rose, I started
an audience at the Getty Museum, “There is something profound to see the landscape changing in a pretty radical way. There was
in knowing that the light that reflected off the desert sand and something quite far away…Normally, there’s nothing there, but
exposed the salt crystals in David Lean’s negative of Lawrence of in the film, it’s like a whole town appears. Behind or beyond what
Arabia is, through a bond of chemistry and process, the very same is visible, there is just a truck stop, but it wasn’t discernible at all
light captured in the print you are watching.” from where we were.
Ultimately, cinema, like nature, only asks you to stay open to its So, I eventually came to the conclusion that the stretched things
quietly moving work. As Dean writes: “The value of any medium you’re seeing in the film are trucks. When you’re there, on most
is that it can act independently of the artist: Not every action is days you can’t see it at all. But within certain atmospheric condi-
deliberate; not every gesture has intent, as any painter can attest. tions, the light is going up and then is projected down, the trucks
Film as a medium brings qualities to the work, some that the mak- are stretching and anamorphosing in a very mysterious way, and
er never intended—characteristics integral to its chemistry and to then they just disappear. Actually, there’s this kind of huge shed,
its internal disciplines and material resistance.” or building, there, and that funnily enough appeared in another
film of mine, JG (2012). It’s actually quite small and tiny in the
Cinema Scope: Chance and contingency are crucial in the landscape. Suddenly, it takes on these epic dimensions, and then
way you work. The description about your most recent film Fata the trucks are disappearing into it. It’s just unbelievably magical.
Morgana mentions that you encountered those optical illusions I took 16mm as a backup option on the film I was making at the
while working on another project nearby. Could you tell a little bit time, so we had only four rolls of backup 16mm, each around ten
about how that happened? minutes long, and that was all. Once the phenomenon started and

65
we started to film it with my crew, we were asking ourselves all sound helps carry a film, even if it’s just the sound of the projector.
these questions: should we use it all now, or keep it for the next Scope: The otherworldliness of the film reminded me of some
morning? But the next day we wouldn’t be there or it wouldn’t of your earlier ones, such as those you did around the figure of
happen again. So we were always sort of judging how much we the delusional British yachtsman Donald Crowhurst, and more
could film. Unfortunately, there’s something that I didn’t get— generally about the relation you draw between film and longing.
that’s the way of the world. You know that weird metallic shape, Watching these phenomena, it makes it impossible not to think
that’s almost like a shield? I would love to have got the same shot, about ancient perception of the earth, with what is far away, un-
at a time when nothing appears. I mean, that shot is almost there, discovered, uncertain, deceitful, left to imagination. Were you
but you’d have to be a detective to work it out because there’s looking for something that relates to such a primeval gaze?
something in the landscape behind it. If I had that shot, people Dean: I feel that Fata Morgana is very much about the picture
could have said “Look! look! There’s nothing there!” Most people of a phenomenon that is happening in a very contemporary world.
work that out by themselves. Because you’re watching trucks, I mean. The trucks help you see
I’m a real phenomena junkie, you know. I’ll always be attract- the Fata Morgana more effectively than anything else. I needed
ed by things like le rayon vert and eclipses. My tiny camera crew the objects and infrastructures to show the phenomenon. I need-
weren’t aware of it at first—they couldn’t see it—but they soon be- ed the highway, the trucks, the shed. It wasn’t the same type of
came quite the junkies for it too. I think it was because I was alive work as JG, which was much more working with different times.
to it, you know...I was already working in the direction we were Scope: But it gives an uncanny vision of the world. You have
looking for. to convince yourself that what you’re seeing is there or that it is
Scope: These phenomena can also be seen at sea, which holds what you think it is. Seeing becomes a matter of doubt and faith
an important place in your work. Was there something about the like in The Green Ray, although it’s not that it’s happening too fast,
desert that was interesting to you this time? but that objects are never fully formed and remain in a kind of an
Dean: Well, the Bonneville Salt Flats is the closest thing you in-between. It feels like the work is not only asking to believe, but
can get to sea on land, really. Because it’s a dry salt bed, absolute- a sustained belief based on fragile forms.
ly flat. It’s where they set the high-speed records. For miles and Dean: I agree with you. But, in a way, it’s a phenomenon that I
miles and miles you just get that flat, white surface. It was the per- just found and presented. I didn’t do anything to it. I mean, that’s
fect place to see it on land, because the Fata Morgana needs that what Robert Filliou’s expression, “art is what makes life more in-
flatness to appear, as well as the relationship between the cold and teresting than art,” is about. I found it, I noticed it, that’s basically
the heat. it. Then, of course, filming an optical phenomenon on film is pro-
Scope: When did your interest in these phenomena start? foundly different from filming it in digital, and that’s because the
Dean: It’s been a really long time. My interest in green rays nature of film is light and lenses and chemistry, which is pretty
came from Rohmer’s Le rayon vert, in a way. I first saw the phe- much what is happening with these phenomena. It’s just that the
nomenon myself when I went to Morombe in Madagascar to film nature of the Fata Morgana, which is like a strange kind of convec-
the 2001 eclipse, and I read in the guidebook that if you’re lucky tion of air, projection, optics, light, chemistry, all sorts of things, is
you might have a chance to see the eclipsed sun setting into the very similar to the nature of film itself.
sea. When we did see the eclipsed sun setting, I did see a green I do think that this relationship is very important, and that’s
ray, but no one else did. I was so determined to see it again that I what you were getting at in relation to the desert and the salt as
came back on that beach the next days, bringing a roll of film every an allegory of film, because I don’t think Fata Morgana work at all
night. I eventually saw one, and it just became the film. well in the binary logic of the digital medium. I think the nature
Scope: Was Werner Herzog’s film an influence in the same way of film itself, and the elusive nature of the way that film is made
for Fata Morgana? with salt and light and optical effects, is a perfect mirror for the
Dean: Yes, huge, of course. Herzog’s Fata Morgana is amazing. phenomenon itself.
I love that film. Scope: I heard you say that the more film has become endan-
Scope: Like The Green Ray (2001), your Fata Morgana feels like gered, the more you’re using film to show what a wonderful me-
an allegory of film, with the salt crystals relating to its own fabric, dium it is. Is this idea of belief changing over time? Would you
the mirages, and even the crow, which brings a folklore of death. say that the more precarious it gets, the more sustained the belief
Dean: I’m not sure. Yes, of course, in an abstract way, but it’s not needs to be?
something that I consciously came across or formed upon or de- Dean: Well, I’m doing my best. The thing is, I’m always an im-
cided for myself. I can see it and I can welcome it, but I’m not sure mense pessimist about it. You know, I talked about film being an
it’s something I would have thought or done myself. eclipse—that the medium is being eclipsed and suddenly comes
Scope: Could you talk about why you left this one silent? back. I still have to believe that film will survive. We were obvi-
Dean: I didn’t think Fata Morgana needed sound, as it is an op- ously doing better before the pandemic than after, but I just have
tical phenomenon. Sound is very grounding, and you don’t need to believe that people understand the importance of film. It’s so
that here. I didn’t need to illustrate the place or the time. It didn’t profoundly different than digital. Unfortunately, film is sustained
need to be grounded in the real world in any way. But what I re- by an industry that has different views, and the artist alone cannot
alized is that the soundtrack is the sound of the projector. The keep the medium going.

66
 Scope: At what point in your practice did you realize that film Dean: There can be mistakes obviously, but you know, here in
was really in danger of disappearing? Los Angeles, they’ve actually got a shop now. You can drive along
Dean: It began when I was trying to get this black-and-white Sunset Boulevard and just pull off outside the Kodak shop and
film stock. I found out that I couldn’t get the material anymore, buy film. Which is a real change, because it used to be that you
and that made me film the Kodak factory in Chalons-sur-Saône in had to go to some warehouse far away; now, you can just turn up
France. And then they closed down. That was 2006; that was the and buy some films. So, if you’re a younger artist or even some-
beginning. First 16mm was threatened, then the Harrow factory one like me, or a filmmaker, you can turn up, get your roll of film,
in London closed, then the film labs, and then suddenly it’s all film. get it processed and printed. I worry about other cities where it’s
And now, since last year, it’s cinema itself. more complicated. You know the Kodak infrastructure worldwide
You know, it’s a constant fight to persuade people, but I just is much diminished. At least I could come here in Los Angeles and
need to have some hope. We need to keep educating people about do that.
the difference between the two mediums. Calling film a medi- Scope: Have you had any surprises, good or bad, when you got
um and not a technology is massively important in persuading the footage back from the lab? You often speak of epiphanies in
the industry, and that language alone was enough to change the relation to what you’re trying to film, but does that happen in the
mindsets. Bringing something of our language, the art language, editing room too?
cinema language. What more can I say, you know the situation. Dean: Well, there was no plan for Fata Morgana.
I’m glad TIFF is showing some film. There was a time when all Scope: But when you’re filming, you may be looking for certain
festivals were showing film. Festivals have to really be the ones aspects without knowing how it will appear on film.
that don’t force artists and filmmakers to have to choose for Dean: You know, we were filming what we could get. It’s so
financial reasons. elusive: one minute you blink, and it’s gone. The thing about it is
I’m sort of campaigning less now…I just try to do it through that you have to hold the shot through the change. That’s why we
my work. It’s taken two years out of my life trying to campaign to wasted a lot of film. The shots had to be long enough to see that the
save film, and it was so very important at that time. But now I’m land that looked more like a pyramid now has become a kind of
just trying to show films everywhere I can. Last year I projected square, for instance. Spectators are relatively lazy, unfortunate-
a 35mm film at the Royal Opera House as part of a ballet called ly—some of them at least—so they need to see the difference. Then
The Dante Project, and it’s just a sheer sort of will that made me I edited the film down and I imposed some kind of time structure
do that for them. I’m not writing to people anymore; I can’t. But on it, from dawn to day. There’s no plan in the film. That’s the na-
yes, you’re right, I use film the whole time to do things that digital ture of where I was and what it was. I knew about it; I’d always
can’t. I really play with what film can do and digital can’t. wanted it. I was lucky to be there: I was there for something else,
Scope: One of the questions you raised in your 2015 article filming the sunrise, and I found it. So, I can’t impose on the film
in Artforum was how to make film manufacturing practical on a something that is not there. Everything else is just found and
smaller scale. Kodak resized the manufacturing process to the about being blessed by a phenomenon and light. I wish I can say
actual demand, but is there some sort of long-term agreement I was always in charge, but I wasn’t. Nature was. I let nature be
from them? in charge.

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AFTERSUN (

Charlotte Wells, UK/US

BY JASON ANDERSON

The image of Paul Mescal lost and losing him- sunnier, stranger successor Morvern Callar Mescal was one of that film’s most intrigu-
self in a crowded, strobe-lit dancefloor is the (2002). That quality also connects it with ing figures; in Aftersun, he makes the most of
most haunting leitmotif in Charlotte Wells’ Wells’ own Blue Christmas (2017), the Robbie the opportunities presented by the leading
debut feature Aftersun, a film that would be Ryan–shot short that anticipated Aftersun in role here while valuing restraint as much as
acutely musical in feel and structure even if it its story of family bonds fraying due to a loved Wells does.
weren’t powered by such a carefully curated one’s mental health crisis. It’s clear from the onset that Mescal’s
selection of underappreciated late-’90s UK The success of Wells’ shorts brought her Calum has ceased to be a daily presence in
chart faves (All Saints and Chumbawamba under the wing of Barry Jenkins and his Pastel the life of Sophie. The reasons for his divorce
included). As glimpsed in the flickering light, shingle, so she was well-poised for a breakout from her mother are left unstated—as is the
his face expresses both the loved-up chem- when Aftersun premiered in Cannes’ Semaine full meaning of the “Love you” Calum uses at
ical bliss expected of the era’s aging ravers de la Critique and scored an acquisition from the end of a phone call with her—but the ear-
and a more disquieting sense of vacancy; it’s A24. Yet the film exceeds the expectations of ly scenes of the twosome eagerly beginning
as if he’s not all there. And while that phrase even those who had early inklings of Wells’ their holiday together in Turkey establish the
risks being more suggestive of some gar- potential. Acutely observed and deeply felt, ease they have with each other. Indeed, their
den-variety weekender blasted on E, here it Aftersun demonstrates great confidence yet dynamic is so free of the usual power struggles
means something more tragic. As played by remains remarkably measured—Wells con- between parent and child that it’s not surpris-
Mescal with great care and precision, Calum tinually finds the means of hitting all her ing when other young people assume they’re
is a man with pieces missing, and try as he notes without the showier bravado or on-the- siblings. Nor do they feel particularly put out
might through the course of the film he can’t nose bids for profundity and poignancy that when they discover they’ll be sharing a double
fill those spaces, not even with the love that’s mar so many first features. In that regard, bed rather than sleeping in two twins, due to
demonstrated in so many large and small ways there’s a striking contrast between Aftersun a travel agency mix-up. Calum’s shows of fa-
in his interactions with his daughter, Sophie and Maggie Gyllenhaal’s The Lost Daughter therly concern are largely limited to slather-
(Francesca Corio). (2021), another recent directorial debut star- ing Sophie’s skin with sunscreen, which every
It’s telling that this image may only ex- ring Mescal. Though the films share an inter- parent will recognize as a fruitless struggle
ist in Sophie’s imagination. Fragmentary est in the thorniest aspects of parenthood, as with the elements.
flash-forwards to the now-adult Sophie (Celia well as the temporary communities created by Tellingly, Calum has less connection with
Rowlson-Hall) and her partner two decades sunburnt strangers at swim-up bars and for- the other grown-ups at the resort and the
after the beach holiday depicted here desta- eign beaches, they couldn’t be further apart in swankier one next door than he does with
bilize any assumptions that Aftersun ought terms of their approaches, intents, and effects: the teens who fascinate Sophie, her interest
to be read as a conventional coming-of-ager. ideas and emotions that Gyllenhaal presents in them leading to a few tentative steps away
Instead, it oscillates between a keen specific- in all-caps and bold type are rendered in much from her father and toward some degree of
ity and a hazy, memories-half-remembered more delicate and elliptical ways in Wells’ film. adolescent independence. There’s a boy she
quality that connects it with antecedents like Starring as the pool attendant hovering at the meets in the arcade who stirs new feelings,
Lynne Ramsay’s Ratcatcher (1999) and its edges of Gyllenhaal’s moms-break-bad drama, and older kids who initially seem like they

68
may dismiss or ridicule her as a hanger-on night, his hidden reservoir of pain overwhelms matographer Gregory Oke, who also shot Raf
but are happy to have her around, expressing him, driving him away from Sophie and into (2019), an endearingly odd first feature that
the kindness that’s refreshingly typical of the the night; he drinks too much, and is wracked Wells co-produced for their mutual NYU class-
characters here. But for the most part, Sophie with guilt the next day. Sophie, however, is not mate Harry Cepka—has a brightness and hard-
is content to stay close to her father as they mad at him—she doesn’t seem capable of it. ness that’s less fetching than it is potentially
swim in the pool, drink mocktails in loung- She senses her father’s fragility, and it’s heart- migraine-inducing.
es, putter around the town’s sites of interest, breaking to see her, even at this young age, As the time to depart nears, it becomes dif-
cringe through karaoke night, and dance the learning how to modify her emotions and cal- ficult to discern what’s actually observed by
Macarena (badly). They also trade off on the ibrate her responses in order to protect him. Sophie in the past, and what’s remembered
mini-DV camera they intermittently use to Though the older Sophie has her own baby in (and reimagined) by Sophie in the present. As
document their days and nights. Here, it’s the later scenes, this is when she first becomes her protagonist nears a breakdown (or break-
Sophie who shifts into the role of observer, as a parent. through) of fevered intensity, Wells drops the
if the girl understands that she ought to collect Due to the internal pressures felt by fa- needle on the only song that could possibly suit
whatever grainy images and smudgy mem- ther and daughter alike, there’s an anxious the moment: “Under Pressure” by Queen and
ories she can so that her older self will have quality even to the most buoyant and warm- David Bowie. (Corona’s “Rhythm of the Night”
something to obsessively watch and rewatch hearted moments in Aftersun. Fittingly, giv- is a close second choice, but Claire Denis got
when the time comes. en the film’s abundance of what The Fall’s to that one first.) It’s a glorious expression of
Alas, there’s a lot that neither version of Mark E. Smith once called “British people too-muchness that risks shattering the film
Sophie can comprehend about Calum. As in hot weather,” Wells lends a woozy, par- into pieces, but feels earned because of the
much as he strives to stay connected to Sophie tial-sunstroke feel to certain scenes, such as subtlety, modesty, and restraint that define the
(and to the present, via his daily tai chi prac- a poignant sequence set to Blur’s quasi-gos- rest of Aftersun. The Situationists and the Sex
tice) and his utterly earnest sensitive-dad pel anthem “Tender” that eventually takes Pistols may have had nothing good to say about
implorations to Sophie to feel like she can tell a more disquieting turn, the song slowing cheap holidays in other people’s misery, but
him anything, Calum knows he’s disappearing and fraying as if melting in the heat. At oth- Wells finds a wealth of beauty and heartache in
and that there’s little he can do to stop it. One er times, the sunlight—as captured by cine- this one.

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ALCARRÀS (

Carla Simón, Spain/Italy

BY SAFFRON MAEVE

A pejorative superficially on par with its sister ranks of the Republicans, great-granddaddy though solar panels look like progress from
terms Big Pharma and Big Tech, which imply Solé hid and protected the Pinyols, whose pro- afar, they quietly deface this family’s material
a gadgety reshaping of the natural world, Big prietary status would have put them at risk of heritage. Consequently, household tensions
Ag looms heavy over the sunny fields of Carla reprisal. However, the paperless economy of simmer: elderly Rogelio (Josep Abad) slings
Simón’s acclaimed Alcarràs, which was award- the verbal contract that has sustained the Solé anecdotes about gentlemanly oaths; his grown
ed the Golden Bear at this year’s Berlinale and clan for nearly a century reveals its precarity son, Quimet (Jordi Pujol Dolcet), sour about
exceeded all box-office expectations upon its when the Pinyol heir, Joaquim (Jacob Diarte), the lack of explicit land rights, endures back-
Spanish release. Set and shot in the titular sells their land to a clean-energy start-up, in a aches which denote the physical tax that the
Catalonian town, Simón’s sophomore outing seemingly straightforward scheme that would land takes out of the family; teenagers Roger
surveys a family of peach farmers reckoning double the profits for half the work. (Albert Bosch) and Mariona (Xènia Roset)
with their final harvest, prior to their orchard Joaquim doesn’t once consider the emo- shirk their schoolwork to respectively tend
being razed to make way for a solar panel field. tional gut punch such a transition might de- to a cannabis plant bed (a cash grab that en-
Peach farming is a generational practice for liver to a family whose identity is tethered dearingly mimics his lineal occupation) and
the Solés, carried out on a plot of land gifted to their shared vocation. Big Ag is a bigger choreograph a Europop dance routine for the
to them by the wealthy Pinyols as a gesture culprit, with the price of fruit plummeting to town festival. But it’s the youngest, Iris (Ainet
of gratitude from the latter clan’s patriarch: unscrupulous lows, compelling farmhands to Jounou), and her twin cousins who elucidate
during the Spanish Civil War, which pitted the abandon their crops in favour of shiny, seduc- both the gravity and levity of the circumstanc-
landowner-affiliated Nationalists against the tive tech. Harvesting peaches is as much about es, cognizant of their family’s ongoing stress
predominantly rural and urban working-class longevity as it is survival for the Solés, and even as they romp around the orchard. It’s this

70
youthful trio that witnesses the first sign of grated, others attempt to shore up an amor- ly: “If the sun were a daily worker, it wouldn’t
impending demolition: a noisy tractor crane phous narrative and (impressive) sprawl rise so early,” she croons, her youthful inflec-
that winches up the ramshackle Volkswagen of personas. tion sharpening the words’ meaning. Rogelio
they play rocketship in. Visually, Simón’s approach is measured mouths along proudly: “If the marquis had to
Quimet intends to fight for the land, though but still pleasing to the eye: one can feel the harvest, we would have died of hunger.”
his sister Nati (Montse Oró) and brother-in- heat and periodic breeze wafting through the At times, Simón’s politics seem disappoint-
law Cisco (Carles Cabós), leaning more to- reservoir and past the lens. There’s also some- ingly gentle or misleading—a vague, innocuous
wards pragmatism and away from emotion, thing of Alice Rohrwacher’s balmy family tab- tap at institutional leverage and a perfunctory
quickly try to curry favour with the Pinyols. leaux in the work of cinematographer Daniela nod toward the adversity faced by Black la-
It’s the familiar, materialist-mythic dichoto- Cajías, with the warm, lucid landscapes and bourers, all existing within a framework which
my of urban landowners versus agricultural images of children gobbling hot watermel- repeatedly invokes bloody revolts of decades
labourers that divides the Solés, something on innards and trucks toting freshly plucked past and includes scenes of present-day pro-
which Simón herself understands. Her uncles stone fruit. “For me, the camera must tell the test. However, the film is at its most affecting
grew peaches in Alcarràs, and through them story for the characters; love them, caress in moments of quiet resistance, aligning with
she watched one of the world’s oldest profes- them without the viewer perceiving other sty- the director’s desire to make something “lumi-
sions wane into obsolescence as corporations listic details,” Simón told Variety. As she puts nous” out of glum circumstances. A late image
opportunistically bought up crops decidedly it, her visual stamp is “rooted in the land,” a of peach flesh striated by tire tracks compels
below their cost of production. miscellany of languid long shots and cutaways with its intimations of tactile violence—a liter-
As in Simón’s acclaimed debut feature, to the natural world. alization of nature annexed by machinery.
Summer 1993 (2017), the ensemble of Alcarràs This farmland is a site for psychic exposi- Simón says she has hope in organic farming,
is comprised of non-professional actors, which tion, an erogenous zone for Simón’s camera to though Alcarràs’ coda may not communicate
lends itself well to the director’s burgeoning press into like the soft pulp of a bruised fruit. that optimism directly. The film’s final beat
brand of rural social realism (Simón saw over Ultimately, Alcarràs is less a character study is devastating (or potentially reassuring, as
9,000 candidates during her casting trips to than it is a repository for shared memory: in per the director’s ethos), with the sounds of
Alcarràs, El Segrià, and Pla d’Urgell before piec- one evocative shot, we see Rogelio and Iris gaz- construction commingling with Iris and her
ing together her onscreen ménage). Tonally ing at the same plot of land, the pair bookend- cousins giggling over the sight of the cranes
similar to Summer 1993, in which a six-year- ing the living history of the orchard: one view- invading. It’s the first and last moment where
old girl quietly grieves the loss of her mother er flushed with decades of remembrances, the Alcarràs’ every theme coalesces: grief, jubi-
in the Catalan countryside, Alcarràs too spins other perceiving a pastoral playground. Later, lation, purloined land, war, notional owner-
a story of bereavement and dispossession, the Iris sings a Catalan farming song to her fami- ship—tomorrow, today, and yesterday.
singular ache of losing that which you never
quite had. But while Summer 1993 is predomi-
nantly aligned with its moppet, Simón foregoes
the syrupy potential of her three rugrats in
Alcarràs, favouring a holistic, intergenerational
sketch of the family as a whole. This, however,
means more proverbial mouths to feed and mo-
tivations to expound, which the film, for all its
assurance, never quite balances. The Solé clan
understandably wishes to preserve the literal
fruits of their ancestral labour, but their indi-
vidual motives are undercooked—a case where,
dramaturgically at least, less isn’t more.
Alongside the final harvest, which serves
structurally as a climax, there’s a series of
neat happenings which range from congen-
ial to crushing: Quimet wins a drinking com-
petition; Mariona is iced out of her dance
troupe; Roger’s cannabis garden is uprooted;
Iris is gifted a wooden recorder. There’s also
a great, winking riff on The Godfather (1972),
with Mariona and Roger vengefully splaying
a slaughtered rabbit on Joaquim’s doorstep.
While some of these moments feel fully inte-

71
ENYS MEN
Mark Jenkin, UK

BY ANGELO MUREDDA

A woman’s observation that lichen has Volunteer (Mary Woodvine) plays caretaker now found. The scratchy, beat-up celluloid
started to grow on a flower she’s been stud- to the local fauna while occasionally throw- image grants the project an evidentiary
ying for weeks counts as bold narrative pro- ing a rock down a well into an abandoned quality even as it creeps into psychedelic ter-
gress in Mark Jenkin’s decidedly low-stakes mine and anxiously tiptoeing past an eerie ritory in its last act, when sea gales disrupt
folk-horror curio, Enys Men. Shot in the same standing stone. The Volunteer’s notebook, the calm of the Volunteer’s cottage—bring-
striking, hand-processed 16mm stock and set in which each day she neatly logs the tem- ing apparitions of dead fishermen and sev-
in the same seaside milieu as the director’s perature of the contaminated soil and the en portentous milk maids—and when slash
lauded feature debut Bait (2019), Enys Men is mostly unchanged appearance of the flower patterns on the local rocks start to appear
a more opaque affair than its predecessor, a that grows from it, tell us that it’s the spring on the Volunteer’s body: first as a scar on her
mood piece about the totemic power of nat- of 1973, although a faint voice on the radio stomach, then as a plant growth that rap-
ural landmarks and the allure of sinking into ominously suggests that catastrophe has al- idly overtakes her. This associative chain,
the historical sites of past trauma. Staccato ready struck the land, and what we take to be emphasized by the wide shots that treat the
in structure and wind-hewn in style, with its this present may already be past. Haunted Volunteer as just one of the many natural el-
stark visuals of rock cuts and crashing waves by fragmented images and mayday sirens ements on the isle, about as distinct as one of
and abrasive, post-synced sound design, the that seem to come from both individual and the branches swaying in the wind, is as deep
film is a sensorially rich but occasionally collective traumas—among them, a wound- as the Volunteer’s characterization goes. Her
patience-stretching exercise. Repetitive by ed child and a shipwreck—as well as cryptic psychic dissolution, which sees her effective-
design as it recreates the stultifying daily glimpses into her future, the Volunteer be- ly absorbed by the landscape, is fairly generic
routines of a naturalist whose faculties are comes untethered from reality as the land- as folk horror protagonists’ final outcomes
in decline, it is most impressive for how thor- scape is progressively inscribed upon her go, as is the thematic linkage between her
oughly it plants its roots in the filmmaker’s body and mind. and the standing stone, with both register-
Cornish soil. Like its poppier antecedent The Blair ing as interchangeable properties of the en-
The “Enys” of the title, which is Cornish Witch Project (1999), though without either vironment in their unmoved disposition and
for “stone island,” refers to the eponymous the expository framing device or the meta- their unmooredness from time.
isle in the Celtic Sea, where an unnamed textual hype, Enys Men plays out as a strange What it lacks in conceptual depth, though,
woman referred to in the credits as the art object of regionalist horror—a lost text the film more than makes up in the visual

72
interest of Jenkin’s stunning, high-contrast answer. Despite the well-worn framing of the and Nicolas Roeg’s Don’t Look Now (1973)—
colour photography of white waves crashing landscape as a touchstone for a solitary wom- the latter of which gets an additional trib-
against brown rocks, and in the pop of the an in the throes of hysteria to riff off, there is ute in the form of the Volunteer’s vivid red
Volunteer’s red raincoat jutting out against something genuinely fresh as well as unnerv- coat, a cosmic doppelganger for the child-
the enormous grey sky and muddy grass un- ing about the constant din of the soundtrack, sized garment that Donald Sutherland’s be-
derneath her shoes. As in Bait, Enys Men’s the slight lag of the sound effects behind reaved father pursues through the canals
curious throwback quality comes not just the image they accompany giving the film of Venice.
from the idiosyncrasies of the film grain and a quaint, lo-fi quality, as if we’re handling a It’s to Jenkin’s credit that these nods—
the manifest history of the setting, effective- freshly discovered piece of old Cornish video particularly to the elliptical cinema of
ly written on the moss and the ancient rocks, art of unclear provenance. Roeg—don’t come across merely as cute cita-
but also the unique soundscape. In the ab- Jenkin’s evocation of traditionalism is tions on a folk-horror syllabus, but as a good-
sence of human voices to bounce off the pro- on trend, though the film’s formal inven- faith acknowledgement of a shared invest-
tagonist, the amped-up sounds of the rustling tiveness and tendency toward abstraction ment in using the unique formal properties
wind and crashing water, as well as the beat- distinguish it from the recent folk-horror re- of montage to treat time not as a line that one
up technological elements the Volunteer in- vivalist works of Robert Eggers (The Witch, progresses along, but a stream one disrupts.
troduces to the land—her hissing tea kettle, 2015; The Lighthouse, 2019), Ben Wheatley If Enys Men is ultimately more than the sum
ticking clock, crackling radio, and rattling (Kill List, 2011; A Field in England, 2013), of the parts it assembles from the history of
power generator—become both a constant and Ari Aster (Midsommar, 2019). Though folk horror, though, it largely comes down
discursive companion for her and a series of Jenkin shares a central inspiration with to Jenkin’s expert wielding of image, sound,
repeating musical motifs for us, their return these contemporaries in Robin Hardy’s and juxtaposition to bring this idiosyncratic
or deferral signalling another day in the cycle 1973 classic The Wicker Man (whose release landscape of lichen, moss, rock, and harsh
or a shift in the routine. “I’m not on my own,” date is perhaps not coincidentally mirrored winds to life. In that respect, it’s a throwback
the Volunteer enigmatically replies to a rare in the apparent setting of Enys Men), the not just to a strain of ’70s experimental hor-
human interloper who checks in on her late film’s cyclical structure and punchy images ror, but also to a kind of regionalist filmmak-
in the film, with the gloomy ambience of her also evoke both Maya Daren and Alexander ing that derives its power from the ground
surroundings granting a ring of truth to her Hammid’s Meshes of the Afternoon (1943) the filmmaker stands on.

73
UN ÉTÉ COMME ÇA
Dénis Côté, Canada

BY KATHERINE CONNELL

Cinema about sex is often enriched by summer mative social structures like marriage, domes- relaxation. Adding surveillance to the agen-
settings: escalating heat can place bodies into ticity, wellness, and community. Its unsurpris- da are supervising social worker Sami (Samir
increasingly erotic orbits as the seeming eter- ing, then, that Côté’s previous feature, Hygiène Guesmi) and German psychologist Octavia
nity of canicular days are pit against seasonal sociale (2021), slyly references the moralizing (Anne Ratte-Polle). Unconventionally, alco-
ephemerality. While fleeting yet formative at- and repressive Progressive-era sexual educa- hol is permitted, as is a 24-hour leave part-
tachments are the nucleus of countless films tion movement of the same name. Yet while way through the 26-day program. Requests
that centre sexual self-discovery, considerably Hygiène sociale raised interesting questions from the participants for clarification only
underexplored are the unenticing experiences about sex and gender, its provocations—deliv- produce more ambiguity: “Why 26 days?
of sexual alienation and turmoil during the ered between characters standing at a distance Thirty is too long, and 23 not enough?” in-
warmest time of year. The title of Québec film- in a field—were buried in a formal experiment quires Geisha, whose question is repeated
maker Denis Côté’s most recent feature, Un that often felt like endurance art. as a statement.
été comme ça, suggests the generic frothiness As if closing the distance that Hygiène so- That 26-day duration provides the film with
of a hot fling, but turns on this conceit to delve ciale opened up, Un été comme ça returns to a loose narrative structure, so that its series
into the highly specific experiences of three the smaller-scale intimacies of Côté’s previous of largely disconnected interactions drifts to-
women in a remote treatment program for hy- narrative features. Léonie (Larissa Corriveau), wards the climactic event of the participants’
persexuality and sexual trauma. Eugénie (Laure Giappiconi), and Gaëlle— 24-hour leave. Their sudden independence to
Across Côté’s varied career is a recurrent nicknamed Geisha (Aude Mathieu)—are the pursue sexual compulsions gives way to tense,
fascination with isolated characters who act adult participants in a two-year-old experi- potentially dangerous encounters, though
in perplexing, unexplained ways and resist mental “recovery” program hosted at a bucol- the presence of subtle, newly formed inhibi-
being known. Whereas geographically iso- ic lakeside cabin. Any underlying therapeutic tions indicates that the subjects are inching
lated, close-knit rural communities stoke philosophy behind the process—a co-funded towards self-compassionate assertion. Just
tension in Curling (2010) and Répertoire des project between unnamed universities in as these scenes appear as the familiar vertex
villes disparues (2019), Côté’s chasmic spaces Montréal and Düsseldorf—is left aggressively of a parabolic recovery arc, the film’s denoue-
are also inhabited by social outcasts and mis- vague. Its architect, Mathilde (Marie-Claude ment is much the same as its first half: time
understood subjects, such as the recently in- Guérin), who is either a research psychiatrist passes without any transformational impact.
carcerated queer couple of Vic + Flo ont vu un or psychologist, appears briefly to introduce Though this narrative obfuscation may seem
ours (2013), the mysteriously withdrawn wife the program as “a journey, not a treatment,” withholding, it facilitates Côté’s exploration
in Boris sans Béatrice (2016), and the solitary and frames the experience as a vacation from of the film’s core interest in the cohabitation
wanderer of Wilcox (2019). These cryptic if mental hardship. The ferocity with which of strangers who share similarly potent ex-
subtly rebellious protagonists form the con- she demands that precocious Geisha take periences. Thankfully absent are the stand-
nective tissue of a filmography that probes the her feet off the couch, however, exposes an ard-fare group therapy sessions which often
dynamics that erupt from the refusal of nor- uncomfortable edge beneath this veneer of unnaturally expedite intimacy in films of this

74
ilk; instead, the trio develops mutual recogni- its audience). While neither Octavia nor Sami her weekend leave. While a lack of contextual
tion, respect, and camaraderie through simply embody the trope of the predatory therapist, development allows the therapists to func-
sharing space—sitting next to one another the idea that they might be aroused by interac- tion as symbolical figures, the same approach
during meals, inhabiting neighbouring rooms, tions with their hypersexual clients points to- applied to the film’s protagonists threat-
sunbathing on the lawn, hiking, or swimming wards a filmmaker contemplating the exploit- ens to reduce the complexities that make
in the lake. ative histories of both social work and therapy. them compelling.
Côté’s refusal to root this fictional program From this angle, it’s somewhat ironic that Ultimately, Un été comme ça oscillates be-
in legible theories or practices effectively side- accusations of fetishism troubled the recep- tween a view of sexuality as simultaneously
steps the clunkiness with which the therapist– tion of Un été comme ça at the Berlinale. Some banal and extraordinary. Despite its gaps, the
client relationship is typically represented on- of its images are status-quo gaze-y, but its film is enriched by a profound respect and ten-
screen. As authority figures, Octavia and Sami more memorable compositions are indirect, derness towards its central characters, which
are completely inscrutable in their intentions. such as when members of a soccer team disap- is underscored by an impactful final scene that
Sami’s introductory greeting to the group—“I pear behind a bush to have sex with Geisha, or also echoes Côté’s predilection for crafting
like people”—reads as equally authentic and a close-up of the back of Leonie’s head as she unsettling images. As the girls prepare to de-
smarmy, especially when he claims he’s “not watches porn, accompanied by the scratchy part the program on their 26th day, they run
a narc.” Although he asks for consent before excess sound emitted by a pair of earphones. with jubilant energy towards the lake for a fi-
entering the participants’ rooms and offers Although the film mostly deflects the stylized nal swim. A highly mobile tracking shot chases
a compassionate ear, he also hovers in door- superficiality with which much contempo- their motion as they kick off their shoes and,
frames and listens to them loudly masturbate. rary arthouse cinema approaches non-nor- without a moment’s pause, leap off the end
Meanwhile, Octavia—an experienced academ- mative sexual expression, it does seem that of a long dock in different directions. Against
ic psychologist—maintains a clinical, profes- Côté can’t avoid certain predictable indul- our expectations for the reassuringly baptis-
sional distance until the film’s final moments, gences, namely in sketching too simplistic a mal image of their resurfacing, they simply
when she makes a shockingly flirtatious trans- connection between kink and trauma: Léonie, vanish. For all of its ambiguities, this newly
gression with Eugénie. The pair’s threadbare who discloses the impact of childhood sexual empty frame is highly satisfying: our observa-
character development means that they act as abuse on her adult sexuality quite early on in tional privileges and intrusions have come to
ciphers for the film’s broader questions about the film, is addicted to streaming gangbang a close. No longer bound to the narrative nor
the thin membrane between observation and videos on her phone and practises BDSM (shi- contained within its spaces, these women en-
voyeurism (a dynamic that is also embodied by bari, electrostimulation, suspension) during ter something deeper and unknown.

75
FIRE OF LOVE
Sara Dosa, US/Canada

BY MADELEINE WALL

“Fortune favours the bold.” Pliny the Younger beyond disinterested scientific observers, the would suddenly destroy the lives and homes
famously ascribed this quote to his uncle, Kraffts were passionately involved with their of the people who’d lived by them for years.
Pliny the Elder, as the latter encouraged an ex- subjects: they spoke often of having personal The Kraffts—both born in the Alsace region
pedition to investigate the explosion of Mount relationships with, and even affection for, each of France in the ’40s—began their work right
Vesuvius. The Elder, however, was not reward- volcano they studied, despite the overwhelm- after the widespread acceptance of the theo-
ed by the Roman goddess for his bravery; he ing indifference said volcanoes had for them. ry of plate tectonics in the late ’60s, and they
died while attempting to rescue a friend. The “It will kill me one day, and that doesn’t both- quickly rose to prominence in their moderniz-
Younger’s writings on the explosion, though, er me at all,” Maurice says of his and Katia’s ing field. Over the decades, Katia, a geochem-
were so detailed that they are still referenced shared devotion in Fire of Love; and that pre- ist, and Maurice, a geologist—respectively the
by modern scientists, thereby attesting that diction ultimately came true, as the Kraffts micro and macro of research methodologies—
fortune can reward some of the bold—at least perished together while documenting an ex- were able to gather, often at great personal
for a while. plosion at Mount Unzen in Japan in 1991. By risk, incredible footage of volcanic explosions
Sara Dosa’s documentary Fire of Love pro- beginning her film at the end of her subjects’ and their after-effects. The dramatic, tactile
files two such bold souls: volcanologists Katia lives, Dosa creates a portrait of two individu- images that the Kraffts captured—the bright
and Maurice Krafft, whose work on and foot- als whose intertwined scientific and personal red of lava juxtaposed with crumbling volcan-
age of volcanoes—often captured at a truly journeys became the stuff of myth. ic stone; incredible mountain peaks against
startling, and dangerous, proximity—pro- For centuries, the shifting world beneath the vast sky; ash clouds stretching towards the
pelled them to fame during their lifetime. Far our feet was a mystery; sleeping mountains heavens—would be well-suited as illustrations

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accompanying a dictionary’s definition of rities, regularly making appearances on talk through thick blankets of snow or ash. Dosa,
“the sublime.” shows. Maurice especially cultivated a public for her part, employs the Kraffts’ archive not
While the extraordinary footage from the persona on the TV and lecture circuit over the only to craft a deeply romantic love story, but
Kraffts’ extensive archive receives much play years, joking about what we’d now call the vol- also to point towards larger themes of human
in Fire of Love, Dosa and her team also weave in cano gap in his and Katia’s relationship (as she investigation into and fascination with those
copious amounts of other found material—tel- had seen 20 more than he had) and his desire enormous forces that we cannot control and
evision appearances and interviews with the to canoe down a lava flow. This self-promo- only begin to understand, to those beauties of
couple, diary entries, and other ephemera—as tion, however, was always a means to an end: nature that are bound up with the power of in-
well as original animation, Larry Jordanesque thanks to their public profile, the Kraffts were credible destruction.
illustrations of scientific etchings and engrav- able to develop a worldwide network of fellow As Fire of Love makes clear, for the Kraffts
ings that takes the film beyond the realm of the volcanologists and local observers who would the opportunity to bear witness to this beauty
simple biopic-cum-nature doc. What the film- keep them informed of any warning signs of was worth it, right up to and including their
makers create here is a portrait of scientists, an imminent eruption, allowing them to drop story’s seemingly inevitable end. Dosa cre-
whose love for each other was bound up with everything at a moment’s notice and rush to ates a haunting premonition of what await-
their desire to understand the natural power the site so that they could be among the first ed Maurice and Katia through a sequence
that they knew would destroy them. As Dosa on the scene, camera in hand. that chronicles the 1980 death of their friend
highlights via lines taken from Katia’s diary But the Kraffts’ footage was rarely just of and colleague David Johnston on Mount St.
and interviews, the Kraffts’ mutual greatest their beloved volcanoes alone. They frequent- Helens, following the audio clip of Johnson’s
fear was that the other would die first. ly placed themselves or a colleague in the last words—“Vancouver, Vancouver, this is
However, even as Dosa plays up the ro- frame, small figures on the periphery creat- it!”—with a series of photos of the explosion,
mantic aspect of the Kraffts’ attraction to ing a necessary spatial—and existential—con- each taken from further and further away,
eruptions, she also details how they shifted text for the furious manifestations of nature juxtaposing this single death with the poten-
their focus to the collateral damage caused by they documented. Though the footage they tial for wider destruction. Later, we are given
these explosions—specifically after the 1977 shot was ostensibly for scientific purposes, a final image of Maurice and Katia in their
Nyiragongo eruption in Zaire, where they Dosa’s assemblage reveals how these images raincoats (yellow and red, respectively) before
stayed on for three months afterwards to col- were not simply captured but created by the they, like Johnston, were utterly vaporized in
lect footage of pristine white elephant bones Kraffts, with the focus as much on the figures a volcanic blast; all that remained of them af-
amongst the ash. Through their advocacy, at the edge of the inferno as on the inferno it- terwards was a camera, and a watch stopped
they were eventually able to convince many self. By increasingly including themselves in at 4:18 p.m. The remaining fragments of the
local governments of the necessity of heeding their footage over the years, the Kraffts drew Kraffts’ deaths provide a stark juxtaposition
the warnings of volcanologists and evacuating attention to their own labour and endeavours with their grand passion: the massive forc-
their citizens prior to eruptions, which radi- without heroizing themselves—not least be- es beneath our feet have been moving since
cally decreased death tolls. cause the footage is frequently funny, with the long before the dawn of human time, and will
This influence was augmented by the pants of their protective suits splitting due to continue to do so long after all we recognize
Kraffts’ status as minor international celeb- the heat or their car struggling to push its way has passed.

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NOPE
Jordan Peele, US

BY ROBERT KOEHLER

Whatever else you may have heard about reached the industry pantheon occupied by The second incident, which takes place
Nope, otherwise known as “Not of Planet Christopher Nolan, Steven Spielberg, Quentin years later (possibly in the present day), also
Earth,” know this: Jordan Peele’s third and Tarantino and Martin Scorsese: moviemak- involves Jupe (played as an adult by Steven
most radical movie is his subversive inquiry ers/cinephiles with enough box-office clout to Yeun), who is exploiting his child stardom
into Hollywood. On the surface, such a stance pretty much call their own big-budgeted shots. from his other hit show, Kid Sheriff, with the
is old news. At least as early as Nathaniel West’s (So if, say, they want to shoot in IMAX, as Peele faux-Western town amusement park Jupiter’s
The Day of the Locust, artists who have experi- insisted on for Nope and Nolan did for Dunkirk Claim, situated in the semi-rural area of Agua
enced the Hollywood moviemaking business [2017] and his upcoming Oppenheimer, they Dulce north of Los Angeles. At 6:13 p.m. one
firsthand have exacted some form of literary get their wish.) The fact that he is the first evening, Jupe witnesses the second mind-al-
or cinematic revenge at the beast that has fed Black American filmmaker to do so, however, tering spectacle of his life: the appearance of a
them. The irony is that it can sometimes seem makes Peele more important than any of these saucer-like UFO hovering over the area. At this
that it’s some of the most successful in the others in our current moment, and also means same time, Jupe’s neighbour down the road,
Hollywood galaxy who engage in this project, that he still remains an outsider in a profound- Otis (“OJ”) Haywood Jr. (Daniel Kaluuya),
whether it be Vincente Minnelli with The Bad ly white-dominated industry. No matter the observes the same event, only without Jupe’s
and the Beautiful (1952), Paul Mazursky with level of business Peele can generate with his kind of close encounter. This flying white
Alex in Wonderland (1970), or Robert Altman films, he will never be an inside player. thing seems to hide in a cloud that doesn’t
with The Player (1992). This seeming disadvantage actually pro- move. It has…behaviour, which OJ, being an
And Peele is nothing if not successful. His vides Peele with the artistic advantages he ace horse trainer, can detect. He refers to it as
emergence with Get Out (2017), with its night- deploys in Nope, which is framed by two inci- an animal, as “territorial,” that “it thinks this
marish depiction of white privilege run amok, dents that occur a few decades apart. The first is his home.” He calls it “Jean Jacket,” after a
followed by Us (2019), an ingeniously clever, one occurs in 1998, when, during the TV studio horse that holds special meaning to him.
Rod Serling–influenced tale blending racial recording of an insipid-looking sitcom titled OJ is trying to keep his family business,
horrors and paranoid science fiction, were Gordy’s Home— about a family who provides a Haywood Hollywood Horses, afloat after the
cultural landmarks, announcing not only a home for their beloved chimp, the eponymous bizarre death of his father, Otis Sr. (Keith
Black filmmaker of far-reaching imagination Gordy—a scene involving popping birthday David), who was killed on horseback in a
and brilliance but also one able to dislocate the balloons sets one of the performing simians corral by a nickel that dropped from the sky
viewer from genre expectations while explor- off on a bloody rampage that runs six minutes and lodged in his skull. Living in a large but
ing disturbing political themes. By the time he and 13 seconds, killing or injuring the entire lonesome-looking two-story house that re-
announced that he was readying his third pro- cast save one: the young Korean-American calls the ranch mansions of Giant (1959) and
ject with Universal (historically the friendli- Jupe (short for Jupiter), who hides terrified Days of Heaven (1979), OJ is frustrated that
est Hollywood home for horror), Peele had under a table. he’s getting no help from his energetic but

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somewhat scattered sister Emerald (Keke park, his notably anti-Spielbergian pacing with OJ punching an alien that turns out to be
Palmer), who works various hustles around that creates suspenseful build and climax one of Jupe’s kid performers in otherworld-
town and is alienated from the horse busi- through the uncertainty of what exactly we’re ly cosplay (thus reversing the comedy-to-
ness (for good reasons, we later learn). OJ is watching—distracts the first-time viewer from horror pattern of Get Out). Another is the
in the ignominious position of having to sell catching on to his master plan. It even seems elaborate, tour de force finale sequence, near-
off stock for cash flow, and Jupe is one of his that, during long stretches of Nope, the pac- ly 30 minutes long, that involves everything
steady customers. Peele satirizes OJ’s situa- ing is somehow off, or at least not conforming from a self-referential gag (as OJ’s now-ally
tion in a sequence that critiques Hollywood’s to the rhythm dictated by Hollywood gram- Antlers Holst—his name alone being a sly mu-
strict caste hierarchies of “below the line” mar. Some shots may appear to be held too sical joke—attempts to capture “the impossi-
crew workers (such as horse trainers), “talent” long; the cutting of scenes yields a destabiliz- ble shot” of the UFO on a hand-cranked IMAX
(such as, of all people, Donna Mills), snooty ing effect, with locations suddenly changed; camera) to rude interruptions to the pace of
directors, and higher-end technicians—em- sudden intertitles mean almost nothing the action (the sudden arrival of a motorcy-
bodied in smack-talking cinematographer when we first see them (“Ghost,” “Clover”), cling TMZ reporter named…Muybridge!), all
Antlers Holst (Michael Wincott)—while also echoing Kubrick’s weird intertitles in The braided into an apparent dance of death be-
supplying us with vital information of the Shining (1980). Odder still is the fact that tween OJ and Jean Jacket.
cinephilic roots of OJ’s business. (Emerald many other scenes are classically delivered, This final confrontation is truly a spectacle,
explains that the Black rider on a thorough- with everything appearing to conform to the with the “ship”—which has sucked up its hu-
bred horse recorded by Eadweard Muybridge Hollywood norm. man prey in vacuuming whirlwinds in imag-
in his 1884–85 series “Animal Locomotion” These modal shifts are nearly undetecta- es meant to resemble the Rapture, but with a
with his invented photographic device, the ble on a first viewing, especially if that first violent twist—unfolding into a white-winged
zoopraxiscope—a kind of early movie cam- viewing is in an IMAX cinema, where the im- fabric entity that looks as if it were designed
era—was a man named Haywood, OJ’s and pact of the engulfing image is a distraction by Frank Gehry. OJ had previously referred
Em’s direct relative.) The gig ends in failure, in itself. But on a second viewing in standard to Jean Jacket as a “bad miracle,” the key di-
because of one telling factor: direct a mirror widescreen (you won’t miss anything, since alogue line that points to Peele’s mission. The
at a horse, and you’ll spook him. OJ under- the action was framed for widescreen), Peele’s dynamically sculptural image of the animal
stands animal behaviour in a world that has subversive strategies begin to be apparent: he killer is the most beautiful in the film, once
forgotten it. patiently takes the tropes of all kinds of gen- again destabilizing genre expectations that
Peele is elaborately setting things up for a res—including the TV sitcom, Westerns, ’50s evil must be revealed as horrible. Hollywood’s
payoff, but his deconstructed storytelling— science fiction, family comedies, men-on-a- addiction to spectacle is what Peele is seeking
such as his startling, disassociated opening mission movies, even Hitchcock—quotes from to question, investigate, and take apart. What
shot (which recalls Kubrick’s edict that a good them dutifully, and then breaks them apart. A are we watching? What does it mean? Even
movie should begin with the most interesting fine example is a genuinely terrifying scene, though there may be a sense of victory at its
image the viewer has seen all day), his delib- edited and staged to excruciating effect, in conclusion, Nope leaves us with these ques-
erately jagged back-and-forth sequencing which OJ seems to be having a seriously Close tions, inquiring about the meaning behind the
between OJ’s place and Jupe’s amusement Encounter—until it turns into a comedy scene images that astonish us.

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 THE BEST
OF TO
DAY
th ’S C
INEM
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