th

46 Annual
Ch
hap
plin
Award Gala
G
H or ing
Hono

SP
S IK
KE
EE
LEE
S AV E T H E D AT E
Mon
nday, April 27,
2 2 2020
For information about atttending the gala,
please contact galarsvp@filmlinc.or
mlinc g.

For sponsorshhip oppo

or tunities,
please contact Elizabeth Gardner
at egardn
ner@film mlinc.org.

F IL MLI N C . O R G / G AL A
Alll proceeds from this annual fun ndraaising ev
e ent benefit
Film
F at Lincoln Center in its mission to su
uppor t the ar t
and eleva ate the cra
a t of cinema.
af

Annual Media

This project is suppor ted in par t by an award from the National Endowment for the Ar ts, and the New York State Council on the Ar ts with the suppor t of
Governor Andrew M. Cuomo and the New York State Legislature.
Photo cour tesy of Marc Baptiste
SPECIAL ISSUE: THE BEST OF THE DECADE

FILM COMMENT Published by

Film at Lincoln Center
January-February 2020

PEDRO
COSTA’S
BREATHTAKING
VITALINA
VARELA
GOES TO
SUNDANCE

Plus:

THE BEST
OF 2019

MARTIN
EDEN

ALEX ROSS
PERRY ON
SCREENWRITING
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 Film at L incoln Center
Preesent s
Festival s & Event s
Throug
gh Januar y 6
Varda: A Retrospective
Januarr y 3
Film at Lincoln Center Free Talk:
Film Comment
o ’s Varda by Filmmakers
Januarr y 7-14
The Bo
ong Show:
A Bong Joon Ho Retrospective
Januarr y 15-28
New Yoork Jewish Film Festival
Januarr y 17
Film Co
omment Select s:
motherr! and Over the Rainbow

New Releases
Now Pllaying
Cunnin
ngham
Parasitte
Opens Januar y 24
Zombi Child
Opens Januar y 31
The Tra
aitor

filmllinc.org • #filmlinc
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Walterr Reade Theater 165 West 65
5th Street

Offi i l
Official Contrib
ibutiing

This project is suppor ted in par t by an award from the National Endowment fo
or the Ar ts, and the New York State Council on th
he Ar ts with the suppor t of Governor Andrew M. Cuomo and the
New York State Legislature.
Image of New York Jewish Film Festival’s Those Who Remained cour tesy of The Jewish Museum
 Published by Film at Lincoln Center
CONTENTS January-February 2020, Volume 56, Number 1

SPECIAL SECTIONS DEPARTMENTS

& COLUMNS
36 The Decade in Review
Another 10 years come and gone—it’s time to do what 6 The Pre-Show
critics do best: assess, reassess, catalog, rinse, repeat! News, Inspired: Angela
Schanelec, Release Me,
• The Best 50 Films and Top 25 New Filmmakers Directions: Albert Serra,
• Essays on the 2010s, including Dennis Lim on key Restoration Row, and more
trends, Devika Girish on becoming a critic in an
overwhelming era, Amy Taubin on the folly and faith 36 12 Critics’ Choice
of list-making, and, as a palate-cleanser, R. Emmet Critics rate and comment
Sweeney on the best hand-to-hand combat on new releases
• Curated lists on the decade by contributors, pro-
ITCOOGTUCPFƂNOOCMGTU 14 Make It Real
Overlooked docs from
52 Best of the Year 2019
• The Best Films of 2019, plus arguments for each by
the magazine’s contributors 16 Art and Craft
• Top 20 Unreleased Films, Personal Bests, and Alex Ross Perry on
Editors’ Picks screenwriting
• And for our annual wrap-up essay, Nicolas Rapold 52

tries a little tenderness 18 Off the Page

H.G. Wells and The
Passionate Friends (1949)

FEATURES 20 Scare Tactics

Silvano Agosti’s In the
24 Pedro Costa by Jordan Cronk Highest of Skies
For years, the Portuguese director has been returning
to the shantytown of Fontainhas, outside of Lisbon. 22 Playing Along
Now, focusing intently on the extraordinary actress/ An interview with composer
character Vitalina Varela, Costa has made his most 24 Nicholas Britell
DGCWVKHWNJCWPVKPIƂNO[GV
66 In Memoriam
32 Martin Eden by Phoebe Chen The decade’s departed
+VCNKCPƂNOOCMGT2KGVTQ/CTEGNNQDTGCMUVJTQWIJYKVJ
this adaptation of a Jack London novel that becomes 68 The Big Screen
a seductive study of 20th-century progress and torpor The Traitor, Beanpole,
and a bittersweet vision of becoming 1917, The Assistant, and
more
60 One-Scene Wonders by Steven Mears
It only takes a moment: actors who make a huge 32 74 Home Movies
impression in a very short period of time have created DVD, streaming, and
some of the best (pocket-sized) performances in recent beyond
years—masterpieces in miniature
78 Readings
Tony Conrad: Writings,
Sidney Lumet: A Life, and
more

80 Graphic Detail
Best repertory posters of
Cover: Courtesy of Optec Filmes 60 the decade

2 | F I L M CO MM EN T | January-February 2020
EDITOR’S LETTER
S
o long, 2010s—we hardly
knew you. I’m only half-kid-
ding: one noticeable fact
about the past 10 years is that
they haven’t taken a precise
shape in the minds of many
moviegoers. They don’t seem to conjure
the same ready-made (and admittedly
reductive) conceptions as the 1970s, or the
1940s, or the 1990s for that matter.
Accordingly, the issue you are holding is
our attempt to make sense of the 2010s in
cinema—to identify some of the key films,
trends, and artists that changed the movies
(for the better, mostly). We’ve recruited
an illustrious cast of critics, programmers,
and filmmakers to share their favorite
films and their observations on the decade,
leading off with essays by Dennis Lim,
Amy Taubin, Devika Girish, and R. Emmet
Sweeney. All of which is accompanied by
the results of our poll of the decade’s best
films and new filmmakers (our third such
survey in three decades!), and special edi-
tions of In Memoriam (by Nick Pinkerton)
and Graphic Detail. You can hear even
more on The Film Comment Podcast,
where we’ve launched a special series called
The Decade Project.
That being said, there’s also a strong
case to be made that the very idea of think-
ing in terms of decades is on the way out. I
know, I know, you don’t want to hear more
Editor-in-Chief Nicolas Rapold
Digital Editor Clinton Krute
Consulting Art Director Kevin Fisher
Copy Editor Steven Mears
Assistant Editor Devika Girish
Consultant Michael Koresky
Contributing Editors
Nick Davis
J. Hoberman
Dave Kehr
Nellie Killian
Soraya Nadia McDonald
Jonathan Romney
Michael Sragow
Amy Taubin
Editorial Interns
Tim Brinkhof, Phoebe Chen, John Gaudio, Kaleem
Hawa, Oya Haznedar, Jessica Moore, Bridget Ye
Editor Emeritus Gavin Smith
4 | F I L M C OM ME NT | January-February 2020
By Nicolas Rapold
about the internet, and streaming, and my- rundown!), we’re proud to have shone the
opic film journalism, and the continuing
collapse of time and space in our cultural
continuum, but... When people ask how I’d experimental, archival opus The Image Book,
characterize the past 10 years, I hold forth
on the disorienting paradox of our time:
the eternal present. Namely, there’s an
increasing sense that the political, cultural,
and technological onslaught and churn of
contemporary life conspire to keep us in a
blinkered state regarding the big picture,
and the past especially.
The reactive format of much film
coverage, social media, and, well, life in
these times tend to consign a rich historical
perspective to the back seat. SPECIAL ISSUE: THE BEST OF THE DECADE
And that’s usually in favor of F I L M C O M M E N T the film that bears her name.
bigger, more brutal forces that
tend toward keeping us passive
consumers. On a critical level,
it can feel like talking about PEDRO
COSTA’S
BREATHTAKING
VITALINA
the unfamiliar is a graver sin VARELA
GOES TO
SUNDANCE
than ever, and it can seem as if
we are to assume less and less
about what folks want to read
or see (and here I defer to Den-
$6.95 USA £3.50/$7.50
nis’s decade-in-review essay for
its incisive analysis of these tendencies).
But at Film Comment it’s part of our
critical mission (and it’s mission-critical) to
talk about the best and brightest in cinema,
wherever that may be. Looking back at
2019 (see also our annual Best of the Year
Publishers Eugene Hernandez & Lesli Klainberg
Director of Marketing & Sales David Goldberg
Production, Business & Logistics
Vicki Robinson
FLC Director of Programming Dennis Lim
Editor-at-Large Kent Jones
To Advertise: call 212.875.5206
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Customer Service and Missed Issues:
888.313.6085, e-mail: custsvc_fc@fulcoinc.com
unique spotlight of our covers on an inspir-
ing variety of movies: Jean-Luc Godard’s
Claire Denis’s taboo-twisting space odyssey
High Life, Joanna Hogg’s revelatory making-
of-an-artist The Souvenir, Quentin Tarantino’s
leisurely-until-it’s-not hangout postcard Once
Upon a Time... in Hollywood, Bong Joon Ho’s
clockwork class parable Parasite, and Greta
Gerwig’s Little Women, an adaptation that
you just might call “radical classical”...
So it is with great pleasure that our cover
honors the achievement of groundbreaking
filmmaker Pedro Costa and his Fontainhas
collaborator, Vitalina Varela, in
Published by
Film at Lincoln Center
Deeply moving and gorgeous-
January-February 2020
ly photographed, Vitalina
Varela is one woman’s story
of mourning and rebirth, and
gratifyingly, after a premiere
last year in Locarno, it will be
showcased in the Sundance
Plus:
Film Festival and then open in
THE BEST
OF 2019
MARTIN
EDEN
late February at Film at Lincoln
ALEX ROSS
PERRY ON
SCREENWRITING
Center. We ignore such genu-
inely independent voices and peerless talents
as Costa and Varela at our own peril, as they
continue to create lasting works of art that
live and breathe in the world and won’t soon
get lost in the slipstream—at least, not if we
have anything to say about it!O
Outside USA, call 973.627.5162
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opinions expressed in Film Comment do not represent Film
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 LIVE HAPPILLY
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THE PRE-SHOW
News, views, conversations, and other things to get worked up about

I WAS AT HOME, BUT...%1746'5;1(2+((./'&+'05%*#0'.'%2156%#4&%1746'5;1(#0)'.#5%*#0'.'%.+5#0&41#.1051

$1661/2*161$;,7.+'%700#*
From left: I Was at Home, But..., Schanelec’s postcard, The Vigilia di San Pietro

IN SP I RED / By Angela Schanelec as told to Nicolas Rapold

Serious Moonlight
In Angela Schanelec’s entrancing family portrait I Was at Home, But..., a mother
and her two children cope with feelings of loss and absence

O
zu’s i was born, but... impressed me long ago.
I don’t know any film title that is more beautiful. I Was
at Home, But... feels for me like a modest, everyday
variation. In the “But” are all the doubts, questions, everything,
which seem impossible to solve forever.
I have a little drawing, which was a postcard I got while writing
the script. I put it on the first page of the script because it was so
perfect—beautiful. It’s a mother and two children on an island.
We cast all the children from their schools, or on the street, or
skater places, or whatever. Some of them are ballet dancers. In the film
I did before, The Dreamed Path, one of the main characters was played
by a dancer. I saw that it helped a lot because she worked with her
body: she tried to find solutions with her body and without talking.
How people touch each other is important in that they often
don’t have the words. So if they don’t know what to say, they try a
movement, which in some scenes involves touching the other, or
trying to. When the mother [in this film] falls on her knees in front
of her son, it’s not that I want to quote an existing image. It’s more
that this is a natural gesture for a mother in that situation.
Ivan Markovic, the DP, sometimes draws something [to
describe positions in a shot]. But I don’t wish to have images
beforehand—it’s just [about] the words, and then finding the
images. As is often said of my films, the narrative is more or less
hidden, or does not exist—I don’t know. But the more there are
these connections with color or light, the more they come into
the foreground, the less you feel a very obvious narrative.
I like the donkey and the dog in the opening shots, but it’s not
that I want to quote Au hasard Balthazar. I had many different
thoughts in my mind—it’s also a German fairy tale, Die Bremer
Stadtmusikanten, “The Musicians of Bremen.” It’s about four ani-
mals. The humans don’t want them anymore, because the animals
are too old to work for them. So they decide to live together in a
house. Then a thief comes, and wants to rob the house. And they
make horrible music! The donkey, the dog, the cock, and a cat—
they cry out and shout! And the thief is so afraid that he runs away.
In the museum [scene, with Canaletto’s The Vigilia di San Piet-
ro], I was looking for paintings and we had several ideas. For me,
while standing in front of a painting, it’s often a problem that I’m
surrounded by other people. I wanted to solve the question of how
you can be in front of a painting, not alone but as if you are alone. So
[all the people on screen] are focused in completely the same way on
the painting. They don’t disturb each other; they are alone and not
alone. And it’s not necessary to talk because there is nothing to say.
Closer Look: I Was at Home, But... opens February 14 at Film
at Lincoln Center.

FLIGHT RISK UGVVJTQWIJQWVVJG75/GZ- Eureka has come closer to

Lisandro Alonso is returning
VQVJGRCUVYKVJJKUPGZVƂNO
Eureka. The latest installment
KPCPKPƃWGPVKCNTWPQHHGCVWTGU
URCPPKPIHTQO La Libertad to
the 1880s-set Jauja is a drama
CDQWV0CVKXG#OGTKECPEWNVWTG
KEQCPFVJG#OC\QPTCKPHQTGUV
DGVYGGPCPFVJGRTGUGPV
and it centers on a woman who
turns into a bird. Alonso hasn’t
JCFCHGCVWTGKPCHGUVKXCNUKPEG
Jauja’s bow at Cannes in 2014.
The previously announced
TGCNK\CVKQPYKVJITCPVUHTQOToni
Erdmann production company
-QORNK\GP(KNOCPF(TGPEJFGN-
egate producer Luxbox SAS.
FOLLOWERS
Director Jessica Hausner (Little

6 | F IL M CO MMEN T | January-February 2020

Affectless voiceover relays Belonging’s sordid details over fixed-frame shots of eerily unpopulated key
locations—all lit in the manner of a neon-soaked neo-noir, and filmed with obsessive, forensic precision.
RELEASE ME / By Lawrence Garcia
As Fate Would Have It
In Belonging, Burak Çevik’s switchback storytelling undergirds
a doom-laden tale of love and murder
T
urkish writer-director burak çevik’s
structurally audacious second feature
opens with an ominous passage that
looms over the remainder of its 72 minutes. A
brief bit of voiceover, addressed directly to the
speaker’s aunt, cryptically alludes to a family
tragedy. Soon after, a voice later identified as
Onur proceeds to recount that same tragedy,
narrating his one-night stand with a woman
named Pelin (the filmmaker’s aunt), their unex-
pected reunion four months later, their sub-
sequent plans to marry, and finally, the events
leading up to their murder of Pelin’s mother.
The senseless crime is firmly rooted in fact,
but rather than stress its personal origins, Çevik
subsumes the story into the iconography of
classic hardboiled fiction. Affectless voiceover
relays the sordid details over fixed-frame shots
of eerily unpopulated key locations—all lit in
the manner of a neon-soaked neo-noir, and
YJKEJLWFIKPIHTQO
filmed with obsessive, forensic precision. The
result—which might well be described by the
title of Çevik’s subsequent short A Topography
of Memory—is unnerving in the extreme. And
aside from exhibiting the director’s uncanny
control of tone and mood, its use of audio
practically illustrates Robert Bresson’s famed
maxim: “When a sound can replace an image,
get rid of the image or neutralize it.”
Bresson’s influence likewise can be felt, albeit
more superficially, in the rest of the film, which
dramatizes that first, fateful meeting between
Onur (Ça÷lar Yalçınkaya) and Pelin (Eylül Su
Sapan). Working with cinematographer Barıú
Aygen, Çevik often withholds facial reactions,
8 | F I LM CO M MENT | January-February 2020
emphasizes movement, and isolates vivid
physical details. Crucially, though, this section
ends at Onur’s morning-after departure, and
shows no indication of the impending crime,
so what we see becomes a mere prologue to this
chronicle of a death. Indeed, if it weren’t for
that preceding premonitory passage, the pair’s
time together would play out as a completely
unremarkable chance encounter; Before Sunrise,
however, this is not. Likewise, the actors’ easy,
convincing rapport—which cuts through the
film’s foreboding atmosphere—might lead a
viewer to wonder whether this story could turn
out differently, after all.
Çevik’s script underscores the question of
fate with explicit conversations about for-
tune-telling, as well as a poetry reading that
segues into a bucolic dream sequence—con-
spicuously florid touches in this film of spare,
unforced elegance. Nonetheless, Belonging
impresses for its conceptual deftness and sug-
gestive power. And though its title suggests the
pair’s paradoxical sense of shared alienation,
the film wisely leaves the matter of psychologi-
cal motivation all but untouched. “It’s a blessing
not to know what is going to happen,” Onur
tells Pelin over the course of their first evening
together. Anguish may follow soon after—or
it may not. But for the moment, at least, we
remain suspended in the unfulfilled possibilities
of the present.
Lawrence GarciaKUC8CPEQWXGTDCUGFƂNO
YTKVGTCPFCHTGSWGPVEQPVTKDWVQTVQCinema
ScopeCPF/7$+0QVGDQQM
JoeJCUTGEGKXGFFGXGNQROGPV
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ect Club Zero through the
Austrian Film Institute. The
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does the same with the chil-
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students’ parents.
BEAST OF THE
SOUTHERN WILD
Dominican director Nelson
Carlo de los Santos Arias has
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ƂNOPepe, the Imagination
in the Third Cinema6JGƂNO
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%QNQODKCPLWPINGtCPKPVGTGUV
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OKGTGQHCocote at the Locarno
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character is a hippopotamus.”
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OF SECRETS AND
VENGEANCE
#XC&W8GTPC[VGCUGFPGYUQH
a secret documentary she is
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ect has been announced:
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King’s 1989 novel The Dark
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ú™¼stêck
Enough 4k and HD videos to make your head spin.
Visit shutterstock.com/footage

It’s not stock. It’s Shutterstock.

“In recent years, I’ve been increasingly obsessed with the certainty that it’s only through fiction that true empa-
thy can emerge . . . Fiction allows me to try to conquer your imagination and make visible what’s in your mind.”
PEEVISH
All You Can Eat
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lings. In case you weren’t
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tainment-industrial complex
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mainstream culture into one
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dangling enough shiny bau-
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tion: “What are you watching
these days?” It might be
because with the onslaught
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ing and the lowered artistic
standards it embodies. The
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and that monsters eventually
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1 0 | F I LM C OMM ENT | January-February 2020
DIRECTIONS / By Manu Yáñez Murillo
Devil’s Playground
In Albert Serra’s explicitly imagined Liberté, an 18th-century cruising
ground hosts fickle and fearsome games of desire
W
inner of the special jury prize in
Cannes’s Un Certain Regard sidebar,
Albert Serra’s radical exploration of
sexual pleasures Liberté will be released this year by
Cinema Guild. I spoke with Serra at his company
Andergraun Films’ headquarters in Barcelona.
Liberté explores certain forms of sexual plea-
sure that imply an abandonment of the self.
You’ve mentioned the writings of Catherine
/KNNGVCUCPKPƃWGPEG
Yes, she describes an abandonment of one’s
own body for the sake of pleasure, but also an
abandonment of any sort of morality. What’s
interesting is to consider the price you pay
for this abandonment, for the indulgence in
what George Bataille called a “useless waste” of
energy, alien to any form of social or natural
profit. In Liberté, a character says: “This is the
price we pay for changing the world.” Liber-
tines, with their extreme sexual practices, have
been pushed to clandestine life, exiled from the
puritan court of Louis XVI.
But that’s just a political price to pay. I’m
more interested in what could be considered
an existential and aesthetic sacrifice. Once you
renounce your own subjectivity, your individ-
uality, what you desire, what you think you
deserve—and I’m talking here about my char-
acters but also about my method of filmmak-
ing—then the price to pay is a certain dehu-
manization. That’s what you perceive when you
read the Marquis de Sade. There’s something
mechanical in his description of sexual exploits,
as happens too with Catherine Millet’s writings.
If you decide to follow this subversive sexual
utopia—where the crowding of the bodies
destroys the capitalist laws of supply and de-
mand—you end up losing part of your humani-
ty. In this sense, Liberté evokes a certain despair:
something dark, merciless, cold, clinical.
The cast of Liberté is very heterogeneous, isn’t it?
Yes, there are some professional actors, but also
friends from Banyoles [Serra’s birthplace, in
northeastern Catalonia], people we cast through
Facebook, theater actors who had never worked on
a movie, and also people from the crew, who were
the ones who ended up doing the most extreme
scenes. The girl in the hardest S&M whipping scene
was a set decorator, and the guy who appears nude
and bewildered between three or four libertines was
a member of the production team.
It’s also very clear that you’re responding to
a contemporary climate of oppression.
Yes, definitely. On the one hand, the movie
presents sexual desire as a democratic force. In the
sensual and sexual intercourses that take place in
the film’s cruising area, social roles vanish in the
hands of pleasure: the dominator can easily turn
to submission, the master becomes the servant
and vice versa. It doesn’t matter if you’re rich or
poor, handsome or ugly, young or old, man or
woman... The sexual game is played with a blatant
arbitrariness. And from that democratic drive
emerges the fusion or ambivalence between plea-
sure and pain, which was something much more
#.$'465'44#%#24+%%+(+./5-1$#.4':5*766'4561%-
common in the cinema of the 1970s. I consider
psychological and moral ambivalence one of the
greatest conquests of Western civilization.
In recent years, I’ve been increasingly obsessed
with the certainty that it’s only through fiction
that true empathy can emerge. In this interview
we’re just exchanging some rational thoughts that
move around the surface of our minds. But fic-
tion allows me to try to conquer your imagination
and make visible what’s in your mind. I may fail
to get in there, but it’s free to fail—it’s just fiction.
Manu Yáñez MurilloKUCƂNOETKVKECPFLQWTPCN-
KUVCPFJCUYTKVVGPHQTFotogramasRockdelux
AraCPFOtros Cines Europa*GKUVJGGFKVQTQH
the anthology La mirada americana: 50 años de
Film Comment.
Brussels Transit moves between fictional reenactments of the couple’s early years in Belgium and scenes in
which the camera itself seems to be the one drifting through Brussels estranged.

RESTO RATIO N ROW / By Max Nelson

Broken Homes
The Jewish diaspora found visceral expression in an Akerman
collaborator’s haunting postwar tour of displacement
Brussels Transit This virtuosic visual sleight of hand is an emblematic se-
5CO[5\NKPIGTDCWO quence for this portrait of a dispossessed couple assembling a
%KPÅOCVJÄSWG4Q[CNGFG$GNIKSWG new life in a strange city. Brussels Transit moves between fictional
reenactments of the couple’s early years in Belgium and scenes,

T
here is a dazzling long shot a third of the way into
this melancholy experimental feature by the Belgian direc-
tor Samy Szlingerbaum (1949–1986). It opens on a faded
“Apartment for Rent” sign taped to a window. In voiceover, Szlin-
gerbaum’s mother, Malka, has been giving an account in Yiddish
of the chain of stopovers—Lodz, Warsaw, Prague, Paris—that
brought her and Szlingerbaum’s father from Poland to Belgium in
1947. In Brussels, she says, they eventually moved into an apart-
ment vacated by a Jewish tenant who’d left for England. “It was
a stroke of luck to find that,” she tells us as the camera glides left
through what looks like a freestanding wall and into a dilapidated
kitchen. “Nobody wanted foreigners.”
The camera floats through the kitchen and into a living room,
smoothly passing over shredded wallpaper, a collapsed bookcase,
and a coatrack. Malka leafs through memories on the soundtrack:
sharing a kitchen, learning French from a young tenant from Lodz.
Meanwhile the camera makes a downward sweep, passes through a
torn-away tile floor, and descends across a wall perforated with grey
craters. Soon it starts drifting away from the wall, taking in a bare,
desolate room. Then, it zooms out precipitously to reveal that we’ve
been traversing two stories of a gutted, bombed-out town house.
like this one, in which the camera itself seems to be the one drift-
ing through Brussels estranged. There are thrumming shots of
an inhospitable train station, a sweeping view of the city from an
elevated railcar, and visions of streets lit by lamps or dense with
morning fog, all set to sounds of Szlingerbaum’s mother relating
her Brussels memories or singing old songs.
Brussels Transit was Szlingerbaum’s only feature; he died of
complications from AIDS six years after it appeared, at 36. It
recalls News from Home (1976), the great portrait of loneliness
and estrangement in New York by his friend and collaborator
Chantal Akerman, with whom he co-directed a short called
Le 15/8 in 1973. But it has as much in common with Dis-moi,
also from 1980, Akerman’s collection of interviews with elderly
women who survived the Holocaust; and Histoires d’Amérique:
Food, Family and Philosophy (1989), her evocation of the bitter
jokes and harrowing anecdotes circulating among Jewish immi-
grants in an older New York. Like those films, Brussels Transit
becomes a kind of archive of Jewish lives in the diaspora, at once
elliptical and acutely plainspoken. Szlingerbaum was “a child of
the postwar,” Akerman wrote in a brief tribute just after he died.
She called him one of “these children who know too much.”

NE W AN D James Baldwin: Journeys from /KEJGN-JNGKƂZ Nana, Mom and Me The Return of the
FOR T H CO M IN G From Another Berlin/1971 including Fertile #OCNKG44QVJUEJKNF Adventurer
RE S T O RAT I O NS Place ;XQPPG4CKPGT Memory (1980) +PFKG%QNNGEV /QWUVCRJC#NCU-
5GFCV2CMC[ /WUGWOQH and Wedding in UCPG%0%
Yale Film Study /QFGTP#TV Galilee (1987), with Institut Français
Center %KPÅOCVJÄSWG and Argos Films at
4Q[CNGFG$GNIKSWG L’Image Retrouvée

January-February 2020 | F I LM COM MEN T | 1 1

CRITICS’ CHOICE Five critics rate and reflect upon 10 films of the moment

Manohla Ed Nicolas Jonathan Alissa

Dargis Gonzalez Rapold Romney Wilkinson

A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood Marielle Heller +++ ++++ ++  +++++
p*GNNGToUƂNOQRGTCVGUKPOGVCVGZVWCNQXGTFTKXGVQ
TGCHƂTOVJCV/T4QIGTUoUYKUFQOYCUOCFGRQUUKDNG
D[CUQEKCNEQPVTCEVQHVTWUVCPFVTCPURCTGPE[qtEG

Bombshell ,C[4QCEJ +++ 0 +++ ++ 0

p6WTPUVJGFGOKUGQH4QIGT#KNGUKPVQCHGGNIQQF
NCF[RQYGTCPVJGOYJKEJOKUUGUVJGRQKPVUQEQO
RNGVGN[VJCVKVoUDQVJDNCPFCPFKPUWNVKPIqtAW

Clemency %JKPQP[G%JWMYW +++ ++ +++  +++

p#NHTG9QQFCTFoUTGUQWPFKPIN[UVQKEVWTPTGƃGEVUVJG
RU[EJQNQIKECNYGKIJVQHECTT[KPIQWVIQXGTPOGPVUCPE
VKQPGFMKNNKPICPFOCKPVCKPKPICWVJQTKV[qtNR

Knives Out 4KCP,QJPUQP ++ +++ +++ +++ ++++

p.KMGCENGXGTRKGEGQHUVCIGEQPLWTKPIKVoUUNKIJV
DWVJWIGN[GPLQ[CDNG+VoUCNUQXGT[OWEJCP#ICVJC
%JTKUVKGO[UVGT[HQTVJG6TWORGTCqtJR

Little Women )TGVC)GTYKI ++++ +++ +++++ ++++ +++++

p#ƂNONKMGYCNMKPIQPCKTCPFCUVQT[QHRWUJKPI
RCUVYJCVVJGYQTNFMGGRUNQDDKPICVVJGUGJGTQ
KPGU)GTYKIVTKWORJUqtNR

Richard Jewell %NKPV'CUVYQQF +++ +++ +++  ++

p2CWN9CNVGT*CWUGTKULCYFTQRRKPIN[IQQFCUVJG
JGTQJQOGDQF[QHVJGVKVNGFGURKVG'CUVYQQFoU
JGCFENWVEJKPIEJQKEGUGNUGYJGTGqtNR

Uncut Gems Josh & Benny 5CHFKG +++ ++ +++++  +++++
p+VKUPoVLWUVCUYGCV[DKVQHEKPGOCOCIKEKVoUCNUQC
OCFN[GPVGTVCKPKPI[CTPCDQWVNQQMKPIHQTUCNXCVKQP
KPCNNVJGYTQPIRNCEGUqtAW

Varda by Agnès #IPÄU8CTFC +++  +++ ++++ ++++

p#RQUVUETKRVVQThe Beaches of AgnèsCPFCUGVQH
FKUEWTUKXGCPFEQPVGORNCVKXGHQQVPQVGUVQJGTYQTMt
CUƂNOOCMGTRJQVQITCRJGTKPUVCNNCVKQPCTVKUVqtJR

Vitalina Varela 2GFTQ%QUVC  ++ +++++ +++++

p%QUVCEQPVKPWGUJKURQTVTCKVWTGQH.KUDQPoU%CRG
8GTFGEQOOWPKV[KPCUVCVGN[PKIJVDQWPFUVWF[VJCV
TGUGODNGUITCPFQRGTCYKVJQWVOWUKEqtJR

Zombi Child $GTVTCPF$QPGNNQ + + + + + + + +++++

p$QPGNNQoUƂNOKUCHQTEGQHEQKNGFGPGTI[CPF
YQWPFGFGCTPGUVPGUUYJGTGVJGRCUVKVUGNH
DGEQOGUVJGTGVWTPQHVJGQRRTGUUGFq—EG

+++++ = Excellent ++++ = Very good +++ = Good ++ = Of interest + = Mediocre 0 = Bomb

Participants:/CPQJNC&CTIKUQHThe New York Times'F)QP\CNG\QH5NCPV/CIC\KPG0KEQNCU4CRQNFQH Film Comment,QPCVJCP4QOPG[QH

Film Comment, and #NKUUC9KNMKPUQPQH8QZ

1 2 | F IL M C OMM EN T | January-February 2020


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MAKE IT REAL The wide, wide world of cinematic nonfiction
The Seer and
the Unseen
Embracing Entropy
Complexity is truth in three unreleased films that our
nonfiction critic ranks among the year’s best
BY ERIC HYNES
T
here’s a tendency among recent documentaries
to start with what’s effectively an embedded trailer:
two minutes of montage, scored to urgent music,
tantalizing the audience with what’s to come.
Instead of an introductory scene, or credit sequence,
or a cold open, the beginning of the movie is really
just hard-sell marketing for the rest of the movie. The practice is
familiar—so much so that many of these beginnings are beat-by-
beat identical—but I remain dismayed that a work of art would
apportion itself this way. The tendency speaks from a place of
fear and insecurity (doubtlessly heightened in this era of fickle
streaming habits) over whether the viewer will continue watch-
ing. The fear may be real, but need that fear shape or, in a limited
sense, become the work itself? It’s like putting the book-jacket
copy onto the first page of the novel.
Yet as with a novel, or a work of long-form nonfiction,
audience engagement is rarely determined by the oversharing
of what’s to come. Rather, our interest is stoked by intangibles
around form, tone, language, and voice—i.e., artistic choices.
We’re won over not because we’ve been promised this and then
this and also this—cue dramatic title-card drop—but because
we’ve been persuaded by these intangibles to invest ourselves
in the lives introduced onscreen. There’s no mathematical code
14 | F ILM COMMENT | January-February 2020
Seahorse
for how a documentary is made, no metrics to ensure we’re
ensnared. It’s thanks to a unique voice and sensibility realizing a
film before our eyes. As the year comes to a close, I’m reminded
of films that took me places I couldn’t have anticipated, films
that offered experiences that far exceeded whatever their pro-
gram descriptions or trailers could have promised, films that
stuck with me and that merit more attention in the new year.
The elevator pitch for Sara Dosa’s The Seer and the Unseen,
which premiered at the San Francisco Film Festival last April, might
have dwelled on the persistent belief in elves, trolls, and “hidden
people” in Iceland. By all means, come for the elf sightings—part of
a culture that Dosa respectfully and ingeniously honors—but stay
for a stealth essay about overdevelopment and the fallacious fictions
of capitalism, as well as a profile of a smart, funny, rational, envi-
SEAHORSE: MANUEL VAZQU EZ
ronmentally committed protagonist who can, yes, observe a world
hidden from standard view. Ragnhildur Jonsdottir is a practicing
seer, one who’s commonly employed these days to consider the state
and fate of hidden people whenever builders or homeowners plan
to slice through the landscape. As captured by Dosa and DP Patrick
Kollman, these consultations play out earnestly, with prospectors
hoping their plans won’t disrupt dwellers hidden in the landscape.
The extent to which these plans might be thwarted in order to avoid
elvish displacement gets tested in the central conflict of the film,
The struggle to live and share, and to be oneself—for oneself and for others—are the personal negotiations
that define Seahorse, a film made of complications that nevertheless feels unambiguously honest and clear.
which involves a proposed highway extension that cuts directly
through a historically preserved, naturally rich, post-volcanic land-
scape that, according to Jonsdottir, serves as the sacred home of a
thriving community of hidden people.
It’s a conflict that pits the private and public sectors against
Jonsdottir and environmentalists—the latter a union between
believers and rationalists whose values and interests harmoni-
ously overlap. What transpires isn’t a David vs. Goliath tale of
activist triumph, nor does it adhere to issue-oriented environ-
mentalist narratives or peddle audience-bating quirk. Tensions
in the film arise over recognizably human aspirations and
actions. An extended climax witnesses Jonsdottir, officials, and
construction workers collaborating to preserve a natural forma-
tion that the seer claims is an elvish temple. They (and the film)
move past the dispute without erasing or neutralizing it, for
the sake of saving something they don’t even concur exists, yet
which all of them value. The film casts the audience as an equal
participant, searching for what’s not readily evident in the frame,
and seeing meaning within it regardless.
T
he audience is doubly privileged in seahorse,
directed by English filmmaker Jeanie Finlay. The out-
line and enticement of the film, which premiered at
the Tribeca Film Festival last April, is readily evident in
descriptions, photos, and the
trailer: a trans man attempts
to conceive and birth his own
child. What’s only knowable
through actually watching the
film is the gift that subject
Freddy McConnell offers to
Finlay, and the gift that Finlay
relays to the audience. What
we get from the very beginning
is an act of staggering bravery
limned with fully owned fra-
gility. McConnell embodies
his complications and con-
tradictions, especially when
having to endure the erosion Mother
of hard-won physically mascu-
line attributes—he has to taper off testosterone, to immediate and
demoralizing effect—in order to enhance fertility and achieve a
different, chemically contradictory goal. He elects an identity crisis
strictly to conceive a child—not because he’s uncertain of who he
is or how he wants to exist in the world. Indeed I’ve never encoun-
tered someone more certain of who he is. Most of us don’t have to
fight from within our own bodies simply to recognize ourselves,
let alone allow unseen strangers in theaters around the world to
see that body in states of such vulnerability.
None of this would work if there had been even a hint of
voyeurism to the endeavor, which Finlay fully avoids. There’s
a sense throughout the film that Finlay and McConnell are
on the level, mutually deciding when and what to film, what’s
essential and what’s too much. Freddy’s relationship with a
potential co-parent at first transpires before the camera, until
that companion vanishes from Freddy’s plans and from the
film—which we’re allowed to track as it happens, in turn feel-
ing our own version of loss. The camera, and by extension the
often-audible Finlay, always feels welcome, or at least brokered.
We’re granted awareness that we’re not always with Freddy, that
the camera wasn’t invited to witness certain moments. What’s
shown, what’s shared, is mutually chosen, and is more powerful
for being so. It culminates in Finlay’s presence in the most inti-
mate and miraculous reveal of all, affording one of the year’s
most astonishing cinematic moments. The struggle to live and
share, and the drive to be oneself—for oneself and for others—
are the personal negotiations that define Seahorse, a film made
of complications that nevertheless feels unambiguously honest
and clear.
There’s a kindred feel to Kristof Bilsen’s Mother, which pre-
miered at Sheffield Doc/Fest in June before alighting stateside
at the Chicago Film Festival and DOC NYC last fall. A film
about people suffering from Alzheimer’s disease and those who
care for them, it hasn’t the same one-to-one collaboration as
Seahorse, but it has similarly crucial qualities of sensitivity and
transparency. Bilsen follows two narrative strands. In a nursing
home in Thailand, a nonverbal American patient receives care
from Pomm, a nurse whose work separates her from her family.
Meanwhile, members of another family back in the U.S. come to
terms with their matriarch’s decline. Too often in documentary,
the very structure of a story
tips us off to where we’re
headed, preparing us to have
a prescribed or predictable
response to what’s happening.
Whether it’s a three-charac-
ter interwoven format or a
rise-and-fall hero narrative,
familiar structures are effective
at engendering familiar feel-
ings, and familiar feelings are
deathly to documentary. Bilsen
breathes life into his diptych
by never signaling where he’s
going, never following nar-
rative beats. The film has an
arrhythmic quality that opens
us up emotionally to what we’re encountering.
Bilsen’s patient and atypical approach to time allows us to
really linger with his subjects without the safety of another nar-
rative strand whisking us away, and it also enables us to identify
the complications of each milieu without objectifying them and
judging anyone accordingly. So when the two strands do come
together, it doesn’t simplify but rather multiplies the emotional
challenges. And instead of concluding on that apex, he offers one
more subtly distended chapter that’s quiet and sad and true. It’s
a sequence set again in the care center, where nurses and patients
persist through each day, with scenes as cyclical and irresolute as
the lives we’re invited to witness. As with many resonant works
of narrative art, its extreme particularity has universal echoes. O
Eric Hynes KUCLQWTPCNKUVCPFETKVKECPFEWTCVQTQHƂNOCV
/WUGWOQHVJG/QXKPI+OCIGKP0GY;QTM
January-February 2020 | F I LM C OMME NT | 1 5
ART AND CRAFT Filmmaking according to the makers

Now the game is about putting oneself

Alex Ross Perry at the
at the mercy of what opportunities are
56th New York Film Festival
available and doggedly pursuing them. The
first line of defense against a writer getting
a job is a producer, and this can be either a
hindrance or a blessing. If my half-decade

ALEX ROSS PERRY: PHOTO BY JULIE CUNNAH; CHRISTOPHER ROBIN: LAURIE SPARHAM/ © 2018 DISNEY ENTERPRISES, INC.; HER SMELL: DON STAHL/COURTESY OF GUNPOWDER & SKY
of playing Al Mannheim has taught me
anything, it is that everybody with the title
of producer fancies themselves a mogul
of such overwhelming vision that the
only possible path forward to paid work
is appeasing them and, often, magically
saying the exact thing that they themselves
have felt this story/article/existing property
needs in order to impress their boss. This is
no easier than guessing a number between
1 and 1,000, but I’ve found that almost
every preliminary conversation with a pro-
ducer involves some form of this contest.
It is also my experience that a great

Uphill Both Ways producer is a writer’s best friend. Brigham

Taylor, the producer of Christopher Robin, is
one such example of this. Brigham’s vision
The director and screenwriter pulls back the curtain for Christopher Robin was complete before
on the indignities of a privileged trade we ever spoke. It was his vision to hire me,
based on my relationship to the material
BY ALEX ROSS PERRY and the specificity of the take I presented. It

F
was his vision to take that script and find a
or the past five years, i have been in the absurdly fortunate director. In a case like this, the producer is as
position to work professionally as a screenwriter. I have written two movies close to the author of the film as anybody.
that got produced on opposite ends of the spectrum—one independent and But on projects where the job is meant
one for Disney—and several others that have not, or may still. Upon learn- to—eventually, somehow, possibly—be a
ing that one latter such project, which had occupied me off and on through- movie I will direct, the priorities are differ-
out 2018 but which was being developed as a speculative pitch as early as ent. This system has been a blessing and a
December 2016, was being swiftly euthanized due to departing executives, my wife curse to my life, as I both benefit from and
remarked that this was a shame, since I had put in countless hours on it. This was true, am defeated by it consistently, often in the
but realistically I did not expect the script to get produced. Why would I, when common same day. The problem here is twofold:
wisdom holds that nine out of 10 projects developed remain unmade? Which brings me 1. Who is to say that after a year or so
to the question I ask myself when sitting down at the desk every day: why bother? of writing and development I will want to
To speak about the state of screenwriting today, a bit of professional context is useful consider making this the next film I direct?
for how jobs come about. (This, of course, is only my personal experience and that of And also, whose vision is it, really? On some-
the several dozen friends with whom I confer.) Long gone are the days when filmmakers thing I generate myself, such as Her Smell,
could reasonably expect to sell their own ideas as step one of making their own mov- my ears are open to input from producers,
ies. Forgotten is a time when a director might have a deal that provides them with a actors, and the crew. But ultimately, I get
professional home as they pause between projects to figure out what creative impulses to do whatever I want. Any misfires are my
to explore. (Every so often, an extremely lucky unicorn still happens upon such circum- responsibility and mine alone. By taking the
stances. But they are the exception, not the rule.) money, an implicit agreement is made that
this is not my project; it is the company’s.
The proof of this is that it literally belongs to
whoever wrote the check. Unfortunately...
2. This system would be functional in
the bygone era of super-producers, wizards
of storytelling whose track records are
unimpeachable. (This generally functions
at the height of Hollywood machinery,
so the best examples of it are people like
Christopher Robin Her Smell Steven Spielberg or Jerry Bruckheimer.)

1 6 | F I LM C O MME NT | January-February 2020

By taking the money, an implicit agreement is made that this is not my
project; it is the company’s. The proof of this is that it literally belongs to
whoever wrote the check.
These people are rarer now than they have
ever been; when they still exist, they are
less likely to hire upstarts like me or my
peers than they are to stick with their fellow
boomers, folks who have provided them
with consistent material over the decades.
Never mind that fresh blood and ideas
could be purchased for rates far beneath
what this echelon commands. Last year I
quit one of the grandest opportunities I’ve
ever earned due to my total lack of faith
that the producers would be capable of
putting their egos aside and trusting me to
rewrite and direct a film in a way I believed
myself capable of doing. Their notes
seemed to exhibit nothing but fear of being
yelled at by their boss, and because of the
money, I had to take them until I realized I
didn’t. Not one of these producers had the
relevant credits or experience to back up
their bravado, in my opinion, and, unlike
Brigham (with two decades of Disney
experience behind him), fostered no trust
or faith from me that they saw the movie
in crystal-clear terms: what they claimed to
want seemed to change week by week. I feel
comfortable telling this story in the pages
of Film Comment because Film Comment is
for people who love and respect cinema—
and, well, let’s just say I haven’t really seen it
on coffee tables in Hollywood offices.
T
he wga is becoming intolerant
of the amount of time writers are
increasingly expected to spend
developing outlines or pitches
in the hope of creating employment for
themselves. Essentially what this means
is that a writer is being forced to outline
the entire movie and present it on blind
faith, hoping it clicks with the producer
soliciting takes and making prospective
writers compete for the job. If an article
or book or property has been given exclu-
sively to you to come up with a take on it,
the process is the same, except that you are
only competing with the producer’s need
to bring a superior idea to whoever comes
next. Regardless, the challenge is coming
up with characters, plot, and tone and
making it something like five to 10 pages.
I have sold pitches off little more than
this first outline, and also done in excess of
a dozen drafts of outlines that eventually
balloon to 15 or 20 pages, only to be told
to go fly a kite. This process once lasted
over six months, during which time the
producer apparently never read the book
or watched the original film adapted from it.
He seemed to base his understanding of the
material on that movie’s trailer and a cursory
glimpse at the novel’s Wikipedia page. His
final email to me, sent in response to a
draft incorporating his latest notes that
took the property even further away from
its source material, said he “gained real
insight into [me] as a person.” I never
replied, but the feeling was mutual.
The issue is how much time this takes up
with absolutely zero notion of compensa-
tion. On the other hand, I’m happy to write
something like Her Smell in a vacuum for
as long as it takes because it is personal and
exciting, and I am doing it for the simple
pleasure of creating something and chal-
lenging myself. Oddly, in the blessed-yet-rare
occasions when the outline clicks, the pitches
are scheduled and then sold, and you get
to “go to script” (as though it is an enviable
vacation destination). Every time I arrive at
this phase I have the same feeling of “I can’t
believe they’re paying me for this.” I also feel
like I got away with something.
And then we arrive at the 90 per-
cent (although that number seems low)
likelihood that the screenplay never sees
the light of day. Priorities shift, creative
directions pivot. Perhaps a new writer
is brought in, they make it worse, and it
goes on life support and then flatlines. If
the producer is committed, like Brigham
was, they’ll try again later and hopefully
find the person who cracks the previously
elusive formula. If you have no moral
compass, you can legally (and with no
statute of limitations) claim credit for
work entirely dissimilar to your own,
done without knowledge of your failed
attempts, two decades ago. But I digress.
Thus it all comes back around to: why
bother? Well, I like writing. The poten-
tial futility must be ignored, as is the case
with most artistic expression. There’s an
inexplicable similarity between writing an
original script out of passion that fails to
get produced and being paid by a studio to
arrive at the same end result. The forces are
outside your control, either way. Now that
I’ve thoroughly depressed myself, I have a
draft with looming deadlines to return to. O
Alex Ross Perry is the writer-director of
Her Smell and one of the screenwriters of
Christopher Robin.
January-February 2020 | F ILM C OMM ENT | 1 7
OFF THE PAGE The art of getting from book to screen
From left: Ann Todd, Trevor Howard, Claude Rains
Marriage Story
David Lean sets the progressive romance
of H.G. Wells’s The Passionate Friends
atremble with renewed neurosis
BY IMOGEN SARA SMITH
D
avid lean’s the passionate friends (1949) is
both a companion piece to his better-known Brief
Encounter (1945) and in many ways its antithesis.
In the earlier film, a fleeting, chastely thwarted
love affair between two married people plays out
amid the drab austerity of railway station tearooms
and suburban streets. The later film spans many years, following
a couple whose enduring passion is reignited every time their
paths cross, and moves between the glorious peaks of the Swiss
Alps and the burnished interiors of upper-crust London homes.
Where Brief Encounter sets up a straightforward conflict between
love and duty, The Passionate Friends has a troubling riddle at its
heart. It never satisfactorily explains why Mary (Ann Todd) refuses
to wed her true love, Steven (Trevor Howard), instead choosing a
comfortably loveless marriage to a wealthy old man, Howard Jus-
tin (Claude Rains). The film’s swooning score and sensuous beauty
1 8 | F IL M C OMMEN T | January-February 2020
disguise its ambivalent attitude toward romance.
It all makes sense when you read the H.G. Wells novel from
which the movie was adapted. Written in 1913, The Passionate
Friends is an ardent, if sometimes muddled, plea for a fundamental
change in the relations between the sexes, for love based on equal-
ity, for an end to the subjugation of women to the jealousy and
possessiveness of men. The movie strips all this away, not merely
ignoring the book’s message but at times actively undermining it.
In the brief scene where Mary rejects Steven’s proposal, he protests
that when two people love each other, they want to be together
always; they want to belong to each other. “I want to belong to my-
self,” she declares. This line comes directly from the book, but it is
followed by an addition that turns the novel on its head, as Steven
quickly and confidently retorts, “Then your life will be a failure.”
Stephen Stratton (spelled “Steven” in the credits of the film)
narrates the book, addressing it to his young son as an account of
his life and ideas to be read when the boy grows up. He recounts
how his childhood friendship with Lady Mary Christian turned
into love: “Always we were equals, or if anything she was the better
of us two.” He is poor and socially beneath her, but her decision
to marry Howard is not only based on the wealth and position he
can offer her. She tells Stephen that she does not want to be his
servant and his possession, and that Howard has promised her
space and freedom (including, explicitly, from conjugal duties).
Stephen struggles with bitter jealousy and resentment, both when
she marries and later, when the passionate affair they embark upon
is found out and she submits to her husband’s punitive demand
that she renounce Stephen forever. Years later, she begins writing
him long letters describing how “intolerably wretched” she is in her
marriage and arguing that something must be done to free women
from “the prison of sex.” Finally, when Stephen and Mary meet by
chance in Switzerland and spend an innocent day together, How-
ard begins divorce proceedings, and Mary commits suicide to save
Stephen from the personal and professional ruin of being named
in the suit. Though now happily married, Stephen grieves over the
ALL IMAGES FROM A PASSIONATE FRIENDS: PHOTOFEST/UNIVERSAL PICTURES
way that he and Howard have torn Mary to pieces between them,
like dogs quarreling over a bone or armies fighting for a tattered
flag (as Stephen puts it).
B
est known for his pioneering science fiction
(The Time Machine, The War of the Worlds, The Island of
Doctor Moreau), Wells devoted much of his prolific out-
put to advocating for his utopian vision of a World State,
freed from the catastrophes of war and inequality. G.K. Chesterton
quipped that Wells was “a born storyteller who has sold his birth-
right for a pot of message.” This is not entirely fair. It is true that
The Passionate Friends has long, undigested passages of polemic,
in which Stephen links the destructiveness of personal jealousy
with the jealousies of nationalism that stand in the way of world
progress, but it comes to life as a novel whenever Mary appears.
Wisely, Lean’s film makes her—by far the most vivid and complex
character—the central consciousness who recounts the story in
voiceover. The screenplay (by Eric Ambler, based on an adapta-
tion by Lean and Stanley Haynes) cleverly compresses the book’s
discursive and episodic narrative into a nesting-doll structure,
opening in the Alps, flashing back to the adulterous affair, and
moving through flashbacks-within-flashbacks to the first, youthful
Written in 1913, The Passionate Friends is an ardent, if muddled, plea for a fundamental change in the relations
between the sexes, for love based on equality. The movie strips all this away, not merely ignoring the book’s
message but at times actively undermining it.

romance. The film is fluid and elegant, with luminous cinematog- perfect. (Trevor Howard, whose great gift was the dry, scathing
raphy by Guy Green; it opens with a visual poem on the theme of cynicism he brought to They Made Me a Fugitive and The Third
white, rhyming gauzy breeze-stirred curtains, clean sheets, marble Man, was rather wasted by Lean on the mild-mannered dream
columns, snow-capped peaks, billowing clouds, butter and cream. lovers he plays here and in Brief Encounter.)
But at its heart there is something shadowy and unsettling. Instead it is Claude Rains’s Howard, the dull, workaholic banker
The Mary of the book, who futilely resists being the property of who claims to offer a marriage based on freedom and understand-
a man—and who says, “My heart is black with rebellion against my ing, who winds up nearly destroying Mary’s life with his vindictive
lot and against the lot of woman”—becomes in the film neurotical- jealousy. The expansion of this character—who remains almost
ly fickle, confused by her conflicting desires, making vague excuses entirely offstage in the book—and the casting of Rains irrevoca-
to Steven, like “I’m not a very good person” and “My love isn’t bly shift the balance of the story. Rains, of course, could steal a
worth very much.” Actress Ann Todd, who married Lean the year scene with the merest lift of an eyebrow, and after biding his time
the film was made (she was the third of his six wives), excelled at through much of the film, dictating tedious letters to a secretary,
suggesting high tension and turmoil beneath a porcelain exterior. he reveals through his stunned hurt and desolation at his wife’s
In The Seventh Veil (1945), So Evil My Love (1948), and Madeleine betrayal that he harbors the deepest passion of all.
(1950), she created brilliant portraits of women whose blonde The ultimate reconciliation of husband and wife, though beau-
perfection masks perverse, obsessive, destructive intelligence. tifully acted and tonally perfect, ends the film on a conventional
In The Passionate Friends, Lean devotes long close-ups to the note upholding the security of marriage. The book concludes with
play of soft shadows over a Stephen vowing to devote his life to the destruction of all forms
face that looks carved from ice, of jealousy—easier said than done. In his novel In the Days of the
but that breaks into radiant Comet, Wells resorted to a meteor whose gasses mysteriously cause
girlish smiles whenever Mary all of humanity to embrace pacifism and free love. In The Passion-
meets her lover. Her romance ate Friends, he speaks boldly through Mary, giving her insights like,
with Steven is almost cloyingly “[M]en have shifted the responsibility for attraction and passion
idyllic, all sun-dappled picnics, upon us and made us pay in servitude and restriction and blame
swirling waltzes, and fire-lit for the common defect of the species.” But Wells, famous for his
evenings. Though Howard, prophetic visions of the future, could not foresee a way out for
when he learns of their affair, women here; frustratingly, he dismisses such solutions as jobs and
insists that their brand of votes, failing to envision how economic independence (and birth
romantic love is dangerous, control) could free women from the prison he described so well.
we see nothing tempestuous As for an end to the suffering and conflict caused by romantic
or volatile in their relation- jealousy—the world is still waiting for that comet. O
ship. Far from demanding
or dominating, Steven seems Imogen Sara Smith is the author of In Lonely Places: Film Noir
implausibly tolerant of Mary’s Beyond the City and Buster Keaton: The Persistence of Comedy,
cruel vacillations, and boringly and has written for The Criterion Collection and elsewhere.

January-February 2020 | F I L M C OMM EN T | 19

S C A R E TAC T I C S The pleasures of cinematic horror

In the Highest of Skies bears a striking

Going Down similarity to Luis Buñuel’s The Exterminat-
ing Angel (1962), but Agosti’s scenario is
In Silvano Agosti’s grotesque In the Highest of Skies, more frightening. Whereas Buñuel’s bour-
geois dinner guests are trapped in a largely
hell is other people, trapped in an elevator metaphorical sense, Agosti’s characters are
BY CHRIS SHIELDS not only figuratively trapped but physically
confined. The predicament of being stuck

I
in an elevator does give way to a more
f you find yourself walking through the prati neighborhood of rome, poetically existential vision in Agosti’s film,
a relatively quiet area in the long shadow of the Vatican, you might just stumble but the terror of that experience is never
upon a small storefront movie theater: Azzurro Scipioni. The two-screen cinema, abandoned completely. The action is large-
nestled between street vendors hawking cheap pashminas and smartphone chargers, ly motivated by the situation as the char-
is the province of Italian filmmaker, poet, and philosopher Silvano Agosti. There, acters eventually call for help and attempt
among neon signs and mid-century movie kitsch, Agosti (who is also the propri- to dismantle their elevator prison—using,
etor) claims to “only show masterpieces.” And if you’re lucky, he might be screening one of all things, their ecclesiastical gifts for
of his own films—darkly humorous, sometimes aggressive social commentaries that are the Pope—in hopes of escape. Ultimately,
unsubtitled in English and hard to come by in the U.S. their attempts prove useless and any sense
This past October, I happened to be one such lucky visitor. When I entered, Signor of agency is negated by the structure’s
Agosti emerged, stamped my ticket, and, following a brief conversation about the un- unyielding walls.
paralleled evils of New York City, directed me to one of the cinema’s two screens, named When a few finally are saved, it’s not
the Sala Chaplin and the Sala Lumière. After taking in the intimate and unconventional through any personal machinations, but
ambience—a chicly dressed mannequin stood near the screen—I settled into one of the by grace. This aspect of In the Highest
theater’s repurposed airline seats. The feature that evening, preceded by a collection of of Skies proves the most beguiling and per-
trailers for other Agosti films (accompanied by the director’s live running commentary), verse of all. For many people of faith, the
was In the Highest of Skies. ultimate impotency of human will is pri-
In Agosti’s surreal and grotesque 1977 chamber piece, several people en route to an ma facie, but for those who feel otherwise,
audience with the Pope become trapped in an elevator. At first the group, which includes the film’s philosophical conceit might be a
two children, two clergymen, and two nuns, handles the situation with surprising calm deeply troubling one. Its brilliance lies in
and a middle-class civility bordering on paralysis. No one seems to panic or even try to its extremity. Taken to its logical end, the
call for help. But as the minutes and hours tick by, the situation begins to break down. idea of helplessness elicits not dread but
Tensions grow, and the elevator becomes the site of variably outrageous taboo and crim- a certain glee in Agosti’s film, as its litany
inal acts: murder, public sex and defecation, rape (by a priest, no less), and, maybe most of shocking moments finally leads to a
unsettling of all, the living sharing space with the bodies of the dead. doctrinally sound conclusion. The eleva-

2 0 | F I L M C OM MEN T | January-February 2020

For Agosti, the film is not about salvation in the face of moral transgression
but the violence inherent in dogmatic belief. His elevator is the inescapable
prison of closed thinking.
tor’s inhabitants, most of them dead and
the rest dying, wallowing in their own filth
and wretched and broken from starvation,
violence, and imprisonment, are suddenly
released as the doors open and the Boschian
hellscape is bathed in light.
For Agosti, the film is not about salva-
tion in the face of moral transgression but
the violence inherent in dogmatic belief.
His elevator is the inescapable prison of
closed thinking. “All these nice people get
into the lift, but when there is no food, no
way to live in a house or be comfortable,
they become murderers... and they eat each
other,” the director said to me with a small
laugh after the screening. After untold
horrors, the elevator doors open to “free-
dom,” but while its passengers are trapped
inside, Catholic dogma alone provides
little material assistance or (real) nourish-
ment. Herein lies Agosti’s political intent.
“Human beings have only two needs,” he
says, “food and shelter. A true government,
a true state, should provide these things for
everyone.” In his film, the absence of these
two things swiftly results in a complete,
ghastly disintegration of the social fabric.
A
esthetically and politically,
In the Highest of Skies lies some-
where between two of Pasolini’s
masterpieces: The Decameron
(1971) and Salò (1975). Its earthy mix
of sex, death, and Catholicism recalls
the pervasive horniness and scatological
humor that make The Decameron both
a joyfully pointed takedown of moral
hypocrisy and a celebration of all things
human (no matter how “dirty” or “ugly”).
Salò’s ruthless depiction of the systematic
degradation entailed by fascism is also
closely aligned with Agosti’s vision. The
properly sadistic marathon of excessive
torture and debauchery in Salò is the
methodological counterpart to In the
Highest of Skies’s marathon of deprivation.
For a film that takes place almost entirely
in an elevator, save for a few shots of the
pilgrims making their way to the Vatican
on a gloomy and haunting morning (the
type of day other Italian filmmakers of
the period, such as Marco Ferreri and the
Taviani brothers, were so adept at captur-
ing), In the Highest of Skies is surprisingly
dynamic in its camerawork and treatment
of space—so much so that it is nearly im-
possible to get a sense of the elevator’s
dimensions. The confined setting of the film
seems to expand and contract as the action
requires; when a character is bludgeoned to
death or it’s time for sex, there’s more than
enough room. Performances from a com-
mitted cast hold the space together, main-
taining the claustrophobic tension through
fits of rage, terror, ecstasy, and pleading
agony. The physical horror is achieved with
unsettling makeup transformations, which
turn the characters from healthy to sickly
pale. It’s not pretty, but it is effective.
No stranger to boundary-pushing cine-
ma, Agosti attended the Centro Sperimentale
di Cinematografia in the 1960s. There he met
the filmmaker Marco Bellocchio. Together
the two would collaborate on Bellocchio’s IN THEATERS JANUARY 29
angsty 1965 debut feature Fists in the Pocket,
depicting strife and murder within a strange-
ly isolated family. (Agosti edited the film
Y O U N G
under the name “Aurelio Mangiarotti.”) In
1967, Agosti’s directorial feature debut Gar-
A H M E D A FILM BY
den of Delights, which detailed the potential JEAN-PIERRE ET LUC DARDENNE
horrors of married life, was completed and “[AN] UNDERSTATED
subsequently trimmed by the censors. His MASTERPIECE…
N.P. (1971), an impressively biting work of as humanistic and
illuminating as any
science fiction that falls somewhere be- of their films.”
tween Soylent Green (1973) and Rossellini’s – Godfrey Cheshire,
The Machine That Kills Bad People (1952), ROGEREBERT.COM
centers on an engineer at a multinational
conglomerate who invents a machine that
turns garbage into edible products. (The
now 81-year-old filmmaker’s skepticism
about corporate commodification remains
robust—regarding the latest American movie
output, he says: “I ask producers why doesn’t
Hollywood just sell heroin instead?”) IN THEATERS FEBRUARY 21
At the moment, Agosti’s films do not
have U.S. distribution, although Agosti’s
website sells DVD editions of his work.
The Azzurro Scipioni has been operating
for 36 years, however, and besides being
a testament to art-house longevity, it’s a
wildly idiosyncratic one-stop shop for all
things Silvano Agosti. Where else does
one person program the films, sell and
rip tickets, run the projection, peddle
merchandise, and, on occasion, claim
authorship of what’s on the screen? In
a place demonstrating an all-in, almost
sacred commitment to great and bound-
ary-pushing cinema, Agosti’s In the High-
est of Skies feels right at home. O
COMING TO DVD AND BLU-RAY
Chris ShieldsKUC0GY;QTMsDCUGFƂNO- FEBRUARY 18
OCMGTCPFYTKVGT*GJCUEQPVTKDWVGFVQ Cin-
kinolorber.com
easte, Sight & Sound,CPF5ETGGP5NCVG
January-February 2020 | F I LM C O MM ENT | 21
PLAYING ALONG Music and the movies

If Beale Street Could Talk Moonlight Succession

New American Songbook

( TOP LE FT TO RIGHT: ANNAPURNA PICTURES; DAV ID BO RNFRIEND; HBO. AL L COUR TE SY OF KOBAL/ SHUTTER STO CK. B OTT OM: ARI N SAN G -UR AI
Composer Nicholas Britell nurtures storytelling melodies into being
that are acutely attuned to the contemporary moment
BY SORAYA NADIA MCDONALD

C
omposer nicholas britell is steadily shaping the sound of modern unforgettable theme to Succession, HBO’s
American storytelling, one project at a time. Britell is probably best known Shakespearean tale of an aging media titan;
as the composer who scored Moonlight and If Beale Street Could Talk, his pampered, protected children; and their
both of which netted him Oscar nominations. In 2019, he was named internecine squabbling and jostling for
Film Composer of the Year by the World Soundtrack Academy for If Beale control of the family business. With tensely
Street Could Talk. Two years earlier, the same organization named him ominous strings and high-pitched piano
Discovery of the Year. plinks, set against a heavy, driving bass,
Britell is the intangible presence who takes the sensitive, heartfelt work of director Britell created a sonic coat of arms for
Barry Jenkins and translates its tender emotion into sound. He’s presently collaborating the Roy family, and the internet ate it up.
with Jenkins again on the director’s limited-series adaptation of the Colson Whitehead There’s an official remix called “Puppets”
novel The Underground Railroad. that features the lyrics of rapper Pusha-T.
“The process is very experimental and it starts from that first moment of sensitivity,” But the iteration that truly captures the
Britell explained during a recent phone interview. “The first time you see a piece of footage, farcical self-seriousness of the Roys and
or a cut of something, I always think it’s really important to be very aware of what you’re their various rich-people problems was
actually experiencing or what you’re actually thinking because that first experience only created by a YouTuber named Demi Ade-
happens once. It’s that first kernel of a feeling or an idea. Every future time you see it is going juyigbe, who sings along to the melody:
to be referring back to that first time in some way. A lot of it is about being very aware of “All the rich white folk are going to argue
those initial reactions, and then experimenting right away with certain things. When I was / and then whoever’s best is going to win a
younger, I remember when I would play a piece of music that I hadn’t played before. The kiss from Daddeeeeeeeeeey.”
first time reading it through, in some ways, was always the most interesting, because you’re The 39-year-old Britell has cultivated
feeling these chords for the first time. You’re feeling the grooves of these pieces, and it kind a public presence that feels different from
of sets a baseline for the way you feel about composers with heavily classical back-
something. It’s [like] the first time you read grounds. He has a traditional pedigree: he
a book, the first time you see anything: graduated from Juilliard’s pre-college divi-
there’s that first imprint.” sion, then studied psychology at Harvard,
Currently, Britell is in the beginning where he focused on neuromusicology—
stages of a new project—a reimagining of that is, how the brain understands music.
Carmen, directed by Benjamin Millepied, “I was always fascinated, from when
dancer, choreographer, and husband to I was very young, with why there were
Natalie Portman. Though he couldn’t reveal certain feelings in music,” Britell said. “I
much about the film, Britell did say that was always curious, what is it about this
it will feature completely original music. chord? What is it about this melody that
Those listening for Georges Bizet’s “Haba- makes me feel a certain way? There’s a
nera” should turn their ears elsewhere. whole field of neuromusicology where
Britell’s profile has risen as he’s Nicholas people study and do research and exper-
become known as the man behind the Britell iments. One of my fascinations was with

2 2 | F IL M C OMM ENT | January-February 2020

Nicholas Britell is the intangible presence who takes the sensitive, heartfelt
work of director Barry Jenkins and translates tender emotion into sound.
exactly those kinds of questions. As with
anything that’s really profound or myste-
rious, the more you dive into it, the more
mysterious it seems. I don’t have more
answers. I got more questions from look-
ing deeply into it. I think the brain and
our emotions are such a deep mystery.
I’ve just always been drawn to figuring out
why I feel a certain way.”
Britell’s works seem to organically
straddle accessibility and sophistication
in a way that goes beyond the typical
programming of a big-city pops orchestra.
They never sound as though they’re meant
to be confined to padded symphony halls
where the average age of the patrons is on
the high end. That might have something
to do with the fact that Britell has long
had one foot in the world of hip-hop and
another in the world of classical music—
while at Harvard he was part of a hip-hop
group called the Witness Protection Pro-
gram. Britell, who grew up on New York’s
Upper West Side, came of age during the
’90s, the golden age of hip-hop. He’s a
human bridge between the South Bronx
and Lincoln Center.
So when a remix to the Succession theme
blows up online, it’s not saddled with the
jokey awkwardness that often characterizes
sonic meetings between classical and hip-
hop. (A good example of this would be the
scene in the 2003 film Head of State, when
Chris Rock’s character interrupts a staid
dinner, populated mostly by older white po-
liticos and donors, to throw on Nelly’s “Hot
in Here.”) Instead, it’s just normal.
P
erhaps that’s why britell’s
body of work is beginning to
feel like he’s assembling various
sketches of America in a way that
will come to define an era, similar to the
way that John Williams, Hans Zimmer,
and Aaron Copland have done in decades
past. Moonlight, If Beale Street Could Talk,
Succession, Vice, Free State of Jones, The
Big Short, and Battle of the Sexes all offer
peeks into different layers of American
life. There’s the obscene wealth of the Roys
in Succession and the informed cynicism
of The Big Short. In Free State of Jones,
which Britell scored, and 12 Years a Slave,
for which he wrote the fiddle music that’s
played by Solomon Northup (Chiwetel
Ejiofor), Britell’s compositions guide the
audience through obscene violence and
STAY
inhumanity. In 12 Years a Slave, we experi- CONNECTED
ence the sickening soundtrack of forced joy
that accompanies human bondage. It’s all
part of a larger mosaic, threaded together
WITH THE
by one man’s emotions and how he trans-
lates them into notes and time signatures.
“So much of the work that I do is based
on my fascination with or inspiration by
the filmmakers,” Britell said. “There are
people who I think are so brilliant and
inspiring to me, like Barry [Jenkins] and WEB SITE
Adam [McKay]. These filmmakers, as
well, are very fascinated with the times
that we’re living in. In some ways, being
able to create music which helps us to un-
derstand the times that we’re living in, or
to look at the land that we’re living in, it
can be, hopefully, a revealing or profound
experience. The dream is that you can cre-
ate work that can live, also, outside of the
times that you’re living in, that can zoom
out in some way and give you a deeper or
larger understanding of things.”
Without intending to do so, Britell
zoomed out with If Beale Street Could
U P DAT E D DA I LY
Talk. It happened by coincidence. And it
happened when the composer’s work was WITH THE
out in the world and ripe for reinterpreta-
tion and appropriation. For Beale Street,
Britell created aural tributes to black ro-
L AT E S T R E V I E W S ,
mance, capturing the unique bittersweet-
ness of hope in times of racialized peril. I N T E RV I E W S ,
The same week the film was released, the
University of Chicago announced that
a scholar had discovered an 1898 short
F E S T I VA L
called Something Good—Negro Kiss. Now
added to the National Film Registry, the D I S PATC H E S ,
work is believed to be the earliest depic-
tion of two black people kissing on film.
Britell’s work on Beale Street was so evoc-
AND MORE!
ative that a Twitter user pulled the sound
from one of the tracks, “Agape,” and set
it against the newly discovered work. The
tweet went viral.
“Stories, they’re almost like a technolo-
gy of their own,” Britell said. “They’re like
this amazing mechanism for understand-
ing things. You can do all this research,
you can read all the reports about things,
you can study things, but sometimes story,
in and of itself, or a film or a novel, they
can just make you feel something—as op-
posed to just intellectually understanding F I L M C O M M E N T.C O M
something. I do think about that, the way
ideas can be transmitted. But ultimately,
for people to really understand things, I
think it’s about feeling those things.”O
January-February 2020 | F IL M C O MM ENT | 23
 PHOTO BY VÍTOR CARVALHO/COURTESY OF OPTEC FILMES

Pedro Costa on location with Vitalina

Varela and Ventura

2 4 | F ILM CO M MENT | January-February 2020

 HOUSE OF THE SPIRITS
PEDRO COSTA RETURNS WITH THE MASTERFUL VITALINA VARELA—
A STORY OF MOURNING AND REBIRTH, A RETURN TO OLD HAUNTS,
AND QUITE POSSIBLY THE MOST BEAUTIFUL FILM OF 2020
INTERVIEW BY JORDAN CRONK
PHOTO COURTESY OF OPTEC FILMES

Vitalina Varela

January-February 2020 | F I LM C OMME N T | 25

“When Vitalina played her part in Horse Money, where she tells the story of her arrival in
Lisbon, I had the immediate feeling that she could go much further, and she wanted to, even
if only to occupy herself. She was not afraid of this work; she gave it her all, body and soul.”
E
arly in pedro costa’s 2014 film horse money,
a Cape Verdean woman named Vitalina recounts
in detail the heartrending story of her late arrival
to her estranged husband’s funeral in Lisbon. It’s
an unforgettable moment in a film that, while cen-
tered primarily on Costa’s frequent lead Ventura,
announced an unexpectedly vital new figure in the Portuguese
director’s work. Indeed, five years on, it’s Vitalina’s presence and
performance that linger most in the mind. Costa’s new feature,
Vitalina Varela, returns to this story, dramatizing Vitalina’s
arrival in an impoverished Lisbon neighborhood and her painful
process of reconciling the memory of her husband with the man
she learns led a duplicitous life in her absence.
Since inaugurating a radical form of collaborative nonfiction
with In Vanda’s Room (2000) and Colossal Youth (2006), Costa
has been developing this approach into a new kind of dramatic
portraiture, with Ventura and now Vitalina as his primary cre-
ative partners and subjects. Still guided by the spirit of the old
Hollywood and modernist masters (John Ford, Jacques Tour-
neur, Jean-Marie Straub) that so indelibly marked his early colo-
nial allegories O Sangue (1989) and Casa de Lava (1994), Costa
has become a touchstone for an entire movement of contempo-
rary art cinema ranging from documentary to the avant-garde.
He now enters a new chapter in his influence and profile with
Vitalina Varela’s selection by the Sundance Film Festival. But
while his hands-on commiseration with Portugal’s downtrodden
and dispossessed, as well as his impossibly rich compositional
sense, have and will continue to be emulated, his humanism
and unwavering dedication to his craft—both pushed to bracing
extremes in his latest—have yet to be matched.
At once Costa’s saddest and most spiritual film, Vitalina
Varela employs gradually interlocking story threads to follow
both Vitalina as she settles her husband’s affairs and endures the
condemnation of his friends and associates, and the plight of a
fragile, guilt-ridden priest (played by Ventura), whose vacant
church becomes a sanctuary of sorts for these damaged souls.
Shot with customary rigor and an increasingly refined and
unparalleled sense of space, light, and shadow, the film invests a
tragic episode in its heroine’s life with an intimacy and grace that
forges new dimensions in Costa’s cinema. Just days before it won
the Golden Leopard last summer in Locarno, where Vitalina also
picked up the Best Actress prize, Costa and I spoke about the
film, subsequently supplementing our conversation over email.
Let’s start with the house Vitalina returns to in Lisbon. It feels
haunted to me, and not only by Vitalina’s husband.
One of the starting points for the film was locating a house in that
neighborhood. One day in the middle of the shooting of Horse
Money, I was trying to find an interior of a house in the African
neighborhood of Cova da Moura, in the suburbs of Lisbon. I
was looking for one of those houses that I remembered from the
old Fontainhas district where I shot In Vanda’s Room. I wanted
to do some portraits of people in their own homes for a musical
sequence with the song “Alto Cutelo.” I asked for help from a
CLOSER LOOK: Vitalina Varela opens February 21 at Film
at Lincoln Center.
2 6 | F IL M C O MME NT | January-February 2020
friend who lives there, who said, “I think I know a house that you
might like, a very traditional and simple house. The problem is
that the guy who used to live there died, and the house is now
closed and empty. But let’s try—perhaps we can go through the
back.” And when we were approaching the house and while he
was telling me this, we saw the door open and Vitalina appeared
in the doorstep, all dressed in black, an extraordinary, grieving
face. This alone deserved a film. She was fearful; I imagined she
thought: “Who are these people? Police? Immigration office?”
But you’re quite right, it’s not Vitalina’s husband haunting
the house, it’s Vitalina haunting it herself. Her fury makes those
walls tremble and the roof collapse.
6JKUYCUƂXGQTUKZ[GCTUCIQ!
This was 2013. When we met I explained what I was doing. I don’t
know if she understood it completely when I babbled things about
“shooting a film.” But when we left I wanted to know more about
her. No one knew exactly who she was. I even felt a bit of hostility
in the air; no one wanted her there. I went back a week later and
she let me shoot in the house, and I asked her if I could take a
picture of her; she agreed and she ended up in the film. Ventura
came with me, and when they started talking they discovered that
they were related, like distant cousins. That made it more com-
fortable for her. When she played her part in Horse Money, where
she tells the story of her arrival in Lisbon, I had the immediate
feeling that she could go much further, and she wanted to, even if
only to occupy herself. She was not afraid of this work; she gave
it her all, body and soul. So after Horse Money I went back and
stayed with her for weeks. We sat in her room and she began tell-
ing me her story right from the beginning: her childhood in the
mountains of her island, her first love Joaquim, their marriage, his
escape to work in Portugal, his silence, his death, her grief.
6JGTGCTGCPWODGTQHRGQRNGKPVJGƂNODGUKFGU8KVCNKPCt
PQPCEVQTUNQECNUHTQOVJGPGKIJDQTJQQF#VYJCVRQKPVFQ
[QWHGGNEQOHQTVCDNGCPFEQPƂFGPVGPQWIJVQCUMVJGOVQDG
KP[QWTƂNOCPFJQYFQGUVJCVEQPXGTUCVKQPGXQNXG!
With Vitalina it took a long time––not to convince her, but to
convince me. To make sure that such a film was possible: how
to do it, how to organize it, how to structure it. Because in the
beginning I thought that this film could be a little bit wider, a
bit more open, and that perhaps there could be something shot
back home, from when she was younger, that happy part of her
life––something sunny, in the open air. But I think she wanted
to stay in this moment, this moment of mourning. She was
going through the worst, most painful moment of her life and I
was proposing for her to organize, to work out and reveal these
terrible feelings and emotions, to turn all of it into a film. And
the more I heard her plaint, the more afraid I was. I told her:
“Vitalina, your words, your pain will be in the film for all to see.
They will be the film—aren’t you afraid?” And she kept saying:
“You must!” I think we both wanted to exhume this horror, and
the film would be the mourning.
I decided we would lock ourselves up in this small, dark
house and do the work. So it took a while to convince me that
maybe we could do it, that she could perhaps go through this
ordeal, and I could perhaps film it. This was a bit more difficult
PHOTO COURTESY OF OPTEC FILMES

January-February 2020 | F I LM C OMM ENT | 27

“There’s less fantasy [in Vitalina Varela] if you compare it with Horse Money. It has a dif-
ferent kind of pain or suffering. Just the fact that it belongs to or comes from a woman
gives it a certain gravity that Ventura—or perhaps men—cannot carry.”
than the other films––not because she wasn’t getting there, or
not wanting to work, but because of me. How can I explain . . .
Even if I insist that everything is true and real, this story is still
less fantastical. There’s less fantasy if you compare it with Horse
Money. It has a different kind of pain or suffering. Just the fact
that it belongs to or comes from a woman gives it a certain grav-
ity that Ventura—or perhaps men—cannot carry.
+UVJGTGCEGTVCKPEQOHQTVHQT8KVCNKPCKPDGKPIKPVJGPGKIJ-
borhood, and also in the fact that you’re now much closer
VJCPYJKNGOCMKPIHorse Money!
Yeah, I really think the time spent doing this film helped her a
little. All the films need particular preparation in the sense that
we not only need to become friends but also some sort of trust
has to be there. I guess our crew understood—we’re only four
or five, so you can become close quite quickly. Her mourning
was the shooting, and vice versa. Sometimes, because of cinema,
I find myself living more with the dead than with the living. In
this business we’re always invoking and calling the other side...
Vitalina already had the experience of Horse Money, but it was
very short compared to this one. And shooting in her house, in the
very center of the neighborhood, I’m sure that gave her a sort of
compensation, almost a revenge. She didn’t seem embarrassed, she
wasn’t hiding anything from anyone anymore. When she arrived,
everybody was suspicious: “Why do you want to stay? What do you
expect to find? Go home, your husband is dead and buried, your life
isn’t here. Don’t you know he had other women? Don’t you know
he was a shady guy? He forgot you!” Every kind of injury or insult.
I’m doing films among a very disoriented community: once they
were peasants, then they were immigrants and they were brutally
exploited. I’m working in the middle of confusion, and it’s risky.
My job as a filmmaker is also to not betray the trust they offer me,
their life secrets, their dignity, their intimacy. It might sound absurd
since we’re dealing with cinema, but my main concern is to keep
their intimacy intimate. Anyway, we’ll grow old filming together,
and it’s right there for everyone to see. It’s a kind of archive now, a
memory album.
1PVJGVQRKEQHCPCTEJKXGVJGGNGOGPVQHVKOGKP[QWTYQTM
JCUITQYPGURGEKCNN[RGTVKPGPVKPTGEGPV[GCTU
Yes, some of the people you see in this film, even in the very first
shot, are already gone.
#NNQH[QWTPGKIJDQTJQQFUUGGOJCWPVGFD[UQOGVJKPI
[Long pause] Death... These people were condemned. And long
before they were born.
6GNNOGCDQWV8KVCNKPCoUGPVTCPEG#EVWCNN[CDQWVJGT
GPVTCPEGCPFQPGQHVJGNCUVKOCIGUQHJGTKPVJGJQWUGKP
both cases she’s barefoot.
In Horse Money she tells the story of how when she came to Lisbon
on the plane she was stressed and couldn’t pee. When we talked,
she said, “I was completely numb. I didn’t know where I was. I had
this lady helping me, and she undressed me.” I said, “Were you
naked on the plane?” She said, “I was in my nightgown, sitting for
the journey, because I was so hot, my body was burning, and my
feet were so swollen I couldn’t walk.” I remember thinking that
2 8 | F IL M C OM MENT | January-February 2020
we needed to film this woman on fire, coming to her husband’s
tomb to avenge herself. And then, as she is always saying: “The
only moments I can forget all my sufferings is when I’m working
the land, a hoe in my hands, bare feet. I’m happy there.” No Cape
Verdean or African works the land with shoes or sandals. So step-
ping on this new world for the first time with her bare, wet feet
should rhyme with her leaving her pain behind—that was import-
ant. Almost everything comes from associations. Little bits and
pieces come together from her stories, her memories, and I try to
organize things and connect them in a way that’s interesting.
9JGPƂTUVXKUKVKPIVJGUGPGKIJDQTJQQFUCTG[QWOGPVCNN[
OCRRKPIJQY[QWoNNXKUWCNK\GVJGURCEGKPVJGƂNO!
I try to know those alleys and those houses the best I can. I now
have time—a filmmaker should have all the time to wander
around the spaces he’s going to film and should have the freedom
to make them his own. I try to live them, to feel and recognize
them because of how the light affects those spaces, of how the light
caresses the walls at 11 in the morning or at six in the evening.
And then it’s an effort of concentration in every sense. But it’s
no different than other aspects of our work––text, performance,
sound, light. It’s not a minimalistic thing––it’s concentration. But
of course, concentration means a little bit less––organizing the
parts and the elements in a more essential way. With a bit of luck,
everything will come together at the same time.
.GVoUVCNMCDQWVVJGEQNQTU4GFKUCRTQOKPGPVEQNQTKPVJG
ƂNOtVJGDNQQFQPVJGDGFDGKPIVJGOQUVQDXKQWUGZCORNG
$WVVJGFKHHGTGPVUJCFGUQHDNWGUVTWEMOGOQUV
I vividly recall one morning, three-quarters into the shooting, I
arrived at Vitalina’s house quite early, and she was dressed in this
blue robe, the robe that she wears in the film. A very beautiful
ultramarine blue, a very deep blue. And I asked her, “What’s new?”
And she said, “I just thought I would go work a little bit.” She has
a little garden, not far from the house, and she likes to go there and
grow her vegetables. “It’s not that I’m forgetting. It’s to work.” I’ll
never forget that “not that I’m forgetting.” I felt something was
beginning to go away. So she can wear something brightly colored if
she’s working. It means she’s happy, and that she can forget for the
moment. She told me these are the only moments when she’s happy.
And she means really happy, not having to think about her husband
or loneliness. Sometimes she says, “As you like to do your films, I
like to work the land.” So we used the robe in the film—we even
have a shot where there’s just a little bit of sunlight on her shoulder,
and it’s very blue.
I’ll always prefer the neighborhood as it is. I’ve never hidden the
fact that one of the thousand reasons that attracted me to Fontainhas
and that made me want to work there was an aesthetic one. In this
film, Vitalina’s door is also blue. They’re very fond of primary, bright
colors. They like to paint their houses blue and yellow, green and
red. And life leaves its marks on the paint; it draws and remembers.
But life also made them a little bit tired and oblivious, and the col-
ors fade. But I can’t blame them. They are oppressed. Now it’s the
social-democrat council governments that tend to paint the houses
as part of their social assistance––yellow, because they will be happy!
They hate it. Their houses were made by their own hands, brick by
brick. And even if the walls were a bit crooked, they loved them.
*QYYCU8GPVWTCFQKPIFWTKPIVJGUJQQV!+MPQYJGYCUUKEM
FWTKPIHorse Money.
One of the reasons shooting this film was so long and difficult
was because of Ventura’s health. This was a difficult project for
Vitalina. It affected us all, but it was especially difficult for Ven-
tura. During the shooting, he suffered two heart attacks. The
first happened while we were rehearsing. But it was just a scare
and it was forgotten quite quickly. The second one hospitalized
him for a month. He had to do physiotherapy for quite some
time. Ventura got quite scared. Having one of us in the hospital
changes everything––at least in our kind of work. So that was the
moment I said, “Wait, let’s think about this.” This kind of thing,
and the things we are telling in the text of the film: everything
seems to be making some strange sense––an almost diabolical
sense.
So we adapted ourselves to shoot most of Ventura’s scenes in
this huge abandoned cinema that we found in the suburbs and
adapted into our own film studio. We tried to make it a bit sound-
proof so that we could record direct sound. We had heaters and
everything to make Ventura as comfortable as possible. It’s not
the first time I’ve made this provision: Ventura, Vitalina, Vanda,
all of them belong to a certain tradition and lineage—they are
studio actors. You could even say they’re the last ones. They need
a certain protection and enclosure and a certain light upon them.
But fortunately for Ventura, nothing was seriously damaged. He
trembles, but nothing was affected. He walks fine. He even joked,
“If I was feeling 100 percent I’d be a better priest.”
Criterion Collection Edition #1015: Three Fantastic Journeys by Karel Zeman
*QYJCU[QWTEQNNCDQTCVKQPYKVJJKOEJCPIGFQXGTVJG[GCTU!
We’ve been growing old filming together. Reaching our limits
together. It’s comforting.
Regarding his work in this film, as we were discussing the project
I mentioned to him that his character would be a priest, and he said,
“Whoa, whoa, whoa. I don’t like priests.” He hates priests! I told
him this would be a different kind of priest. And actually this priest
exists. One day, Vitalina told me a true story that happened to this
young priest from Cape Verde who did not want to baptize a group
of people for some bureaucratic reasons; he told them they were not
prepared to be baptized and that they should go to another parish.
So they all leave in a van, the van crashes, and everybody dies. He
lost his mind and began to lose his faith. The guilt-ridden priest
becomes a beggar in the streets of Cape Verde and the bishops
decide to “deport” the poor priest to Portugal, where, it seems, he
still survives in extreme poverty. So we said, well, maybe he’s settled
in this church, and tried to congregate but nobody comes, so he’s
here sad and all alone—a kind of fool on the hill.
Ventura really liked that idea: having his own church,
even if he knew he would have no congregation. Not only did
Vitalina witness the accident—which she recalls in a scene in the
church—but Ventura’s eyes twinkled with malice when I pro-
posed to him this scenario. That was it! We built the set for that
church ourselves; we copied the real shack church that we shot
when Ventura enters at night. It sort of reminds us of the caves
of the primitive Christians. Vitalina adored that church. She sat
in those chairs rehearsing, praying, thinking.
January-February 2020 | F ILM C O M MENT | 29
“I felt [this film] could give me the chance to approach the Cape Verdean immigra-
tion from the woman’s point of view. The history of the African diaspora is generally
a men’s tale: they sail first and come to the new world, leaving their women behind,
and sometimes their children too.”
6JGUJQVQPVQRQHVJGJQWUGYJGPKVoUTCKPKPICPF8KVCNKPCKU
ƂZKPIVJGTQQHUGGOUVQOGRGTJCRUVJGENQUGUV[QWoXGEQOG
to John Ford.
That’s because of Vitalina’s hand over her eyes, isn’t it? It was a
difficult shot to prepare. It involved some construction in our
improvised studio: the wind, etc. But the actual shooting was
easier than we all thought it would be; we didn’t need that many
takes. It was just because Vitalina had really performed those
actions quite a few times in her real life: climbing to the roof on
stormy nights, trying to stop the rain from falling in her kitchen
or on her bed. Some days we also felt it, the fury of the wind on
the tiles, the rumble of the dirt on the roof. I can tell you it was
quite scary! But it never discouraged Vitalina. She had to go up
and try to repair “that awful job Joaquim had done.” Vitalina
and I just agreed on a certain number of actions and steps and
pace for the roof scene.
Thinking that it would be a rough shoot, I also anticipated
that it could be somewhat documentary. So I didn’t block the
ending; I just told Vitalina to go as far as she could, and then we
would cut. And as we went along, I saw that she slowly came to
this posture, her hand over her front, eyes far out on the hori-
zon. I never asked her why she did that or what was she seeing.
3 0 | F I LM C O MMENT | January-February 2020
But it was because of this shot that I decided to go to Cape Verde
to shoot the ending of the film. Who knows, maybe Vitalina is
seeing herself, on top of another roof, across the ocean.
But for me, with this scene you could also think of some
of the women in Mizoguchi’s films, if only because John Ford
was more manly. But it could also be Russian—it could be
Dovzhenko. But of course if you have that, what can you do:
you’re surrounded by ghosts again. I’m not saying it’s a shot
or an image I remember from Mizoguchi. It’s more a spirit of
mothers, widows, running around the landscape in Japan, escap-
ing soldiers, battling, searching for food, repairing, et cetera. But,
I guess, more than Ford or Mizoguchi, I’m thinking of a film-
maker who was certainly important for this film: Mikio Naruse.
The first time I went to Japan, I met the great Japanese writer,
essayist, and critic Shigehiko Hasumi, who wrote the most beau-
tiful book on Ozu. I had seen a lot of Ozu and Mizoguchi, but
it was Professor Hasumi who first told me about Naruse. This
must have been almost 20 years ago, and I remember him com-
menting: “Mikio Naruse was a very shy, reserved, and tormented
man. Because he had the feeling that the world had betrayed
him.” I remember Hasumi gave me some VHS tapes: When a
Woman Ascends the Stairs, Mother, et cetera. He made hundreds
of films, all of them absolutely marvelous. There’s a kind of
sordid evocation of the couple in his work––and by evocation I
mean some inserts or some ways of suggesting the sordid bits of
a relationship that are very strong.
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This film does come closer to In Vanda’s Room in a lot of ways,
I think, in trying to surround Vitalina with the sound of a place
that she didn’t know. She didn’t know the neighborhood that
I knew. She’s new here. So all she hears in the film is new to
her. The sound that was in Vanda, the brouhaha of life, and the
contradiction of public and private––there’s nothing secret, and
at the same time nothing is public. The frontier between shame
and spectacle is very thin. And that’s very interesting. You can
work with that, and we did in this film. Vitalina’s surrounded
by sounds, by this life... or death, I don’t know. But this idea for PHOTO BY VÍTOR CARVALHO/COURTESY OF OPTEC FILMES
the sound comes straight from Vanda, from the old neighbor-
hood––the streets, the houses, the windows, the stairs. I think
with this film I was trying to get back home in a sense, to my
film home, and Vitalina is new in this home. She comes from the
mountains, she comes from the sunlight. She’s not used to being
imprisoned in a cell.
In a way, I was relieved when Vitalina suddenly appeared in
my life. I was spending most of my time with Ventura, Nhurro,
and the “boys,” in a man’s world. As I said, this encounter with
Vitalina deserved a film. And I also felt it could give me the
chance to approach the Cape Verdean immigration from the
woman’s point of view. The history of the African diaspora is
generally a men’s tale: they sail first and come to the new world,
leaving their women behind, and sometimes their children too.
“I will save money; I will send you a plane ticket in a year or
two.” Needless to say, after a few months most men forget. Life
in the big western cities is hard, they work long hours, it’s impos-
sible to put money aside, build a shack... And then there are the
pleasures and traps of capitalism. They forget to write; they forget
to call. Until they meet another woman and they find themselves
with two families: one in the new world and one waiting back
home on the islands. It’s a sad sociological cliché. There’s a line
in Sans soleil where Marker draws a portrait of the Cape Verdean
people: “How long have they been there waiting for the boat? . . .
A people of nothing, a people of emptiness, a vertical people.” In
reality, it’s the Cape Verdean women he’s depicting.
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It’s the first time she’s traveled outside of Cape Verde or Portugal.
Last night, after the screening, she told us that she would like to
keep watching the film, that she wished the night could keep going
with her on the screen, and that she would like to sleep in the the-
ater. Something she still finds strange is the fact that the film has
her name. I asked her, “Don’t you like it?” She said, “No, no, it’s
just strange. I could have given you a good title.” [Laughs]
You said at the time of Horse MoneyVJCV[QWOCFGVJCVƂNO
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I think so, yeah. Even if you think it’s very sad—and maybe it
is—it’s a good thing. A good thing in the sense that we tried
our best within our capacities. I think this film is a very moving
effort to say goodbye to a loved one. Vitalina is saying goodbye
We have a passion
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in order to heal the wounds and appease her sufferings. She has
to go on living and remembering her late husband’s betrayal.
A little altar with a crucifix, two candles, a few photos of him,
and a saucer to collect some change... we lost the will to do
these small things, didn’t we? In the Cape Verdean community,
mourning still has a certain importance. Vitalina couldn’t attend
the wake and the funeral because she arrived too late, everything
had already been taken care of. But since in real life she didn’t
have the chance to take part in the ceremonies, she could live the
whole ritual in this film. I guess that Vitalina somehow wanted
to claim her spousal right to perform these funerary rites.
And in the end, it’s our turn to say goodbye to Vitalina.
Every film must learn to say goodbye to its characters. After
all that Vitalina endured, it would have been too easy to con-
demn her to the purgatory of those four walls. She must have
her justice. She goes back to the very beginning, to the highest
mountains, to the beginning of her love story with Joaquim, to
the sparkle of love and happiness. Vitalina gave her heart and
soul to this film. So in that sense, it is good work. Not better
or worse than other work. But it’s good work, useful work. In
the end, we rejoin something I believe that cinema must go on
doing: keeping the flame alive. O
,QTFCP%TQPMis a critic and programmer based in Los Angeles.
He runs Acropolis Cinema, a screening series for experimental
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Film Critics Association.
January-February 2020 | F IL M C OMMEN T | 3 1
 COLLECTIVE
CONSCIOUSNESS
THE MAKING AND UNMAKING OF A
NOVELIST REFLECTS THE EBB AND
FLOW OF A TROUBLED CENTURY IN
PIETRO MARCELLO’S JACK LONDON
ADAPTATION MARTIN EDEN
BY P HOE B E CH E N
3 2 | F I LM C OMM EN T | January-February 2020
E
arly in jack london’s 1909 novel martin eden,
there is a scattering of references to technical ephemera
that the 20th century will promptly leave behind: “chro-
mos and lithographs,” those early attempts at large-scale
reproduction; “a vast camera obscura,” by then a cen-
turies-old relic; a bullfight so fervid it’s like “gazing into
a kinetoscope,” that proto-cinematic spectacle of cloistered motion.
These objects now seem like archaic curios, not much more than the
flotsam of culture from the moment it shifted gears to mass produc-
tion. It’s a change in scale that also ensnares the novel’s title character,
a hardy young sailor and autodidact-turned-writer-célèbre, famously
an avatar of London’s own hollowing transmutation into a figure for
mass consumption. But, lucky him—he remains eminent now on
the other side of a century; chance still leaves a world of names and
faces to gather dust. Easily the most arresting aspect of Pietro Mar-
cello’s new adaptation is its spotlight on the peripheral: from start to
end, London’s linear Künstlerroman is intercut with a dizzying range
of archival footage, from a decaying nitrate strip of anarchist Errico
Malatesta at a workers’ rally to home video–style super 16mm of
kids jiving by an arcade game. In these ghostly interludes, Marcello
reanimates the visual detritus of industrial production as a kind of
archival unconscious.
This temporal remixing is central to Marcello’s work, mostly
experimental documentaries that skew auto-ethnographic and
use elusive, essayistic editing to constellate place and memory, but
always with a clear eye to the present. Marcello’s first feature, Cross-
ing the Line (2007), gathers footage of domestic migrant workers
and the nocturnal trains that barrel them to jobs across the coun-
try, laying down a recurring fascination with infrastructure. By his
second feature, The Mouth of the Wolf (2009), there is already the
sense of an artist in riveting negotiation with the scope of his story
and setting. Commissioned by a Jesuit foundation during Marcello’s
yearlong residency in the port city of Genoa, the film ebbs between
a city-symphonic array and a singular focus on the story of a trans
sex worker and her formerly incarcerated lover, still together after
20-odd years and spells of separation. Their lives are bound up with
a poetic figuration of the city’s making, from the mythic horizon of
CLOS ER LO OK: Martin Eden opens April 7.
January-February 2020 | F I LM C OM M E NT | 3 3
ancient travails, recalled in bluer-than-blue shots of the Ligurian Sea
at dawn, to new-millennium enterprise in the docklands, filled with
shipping crates and bulldozers busy with destruction.
Marcello brings a similar approach to Martin Eden, though its
emphasis is inverted: it’s the individual narrative that telescopes a
broader history of 20th-century Italy. In this pivotal move, Mar-
cello and co-writer Maurizio Braucci shift London’s Oakland-set
story to Naples, switching the cold expanse of the North Pacific
for the Mediterranean and its well-traversed waters. The young
century, too, is switched out for an indeterminate period with
jumbled signifiers: initial clues point to a time just shy of World
War II, though a television set in a working-class household soon
suggests the late ’50s, and then a plastic helicopter figurine loosely
yokes us to the ’70s. Even the score delights in anachronism,
marked by a heavy synth bass that perforates the sacral reverb
of a cappella and organ song, like a discotheque in a cathedral.
And—why not?—’70s and ’80s Europop throwbacks lend archi-
val sequences a further sense of epochal collapse. While Marcello
worked with researcher Alessia Petitto for the film’s analog trove,
much of its vintage stock is feigned by hand-tinting and distress-
ing original 16mm footage. Sometimes a medium-change jolts
with sudden incongruity,
as in a cut to dockworkers Martin’s writer’s opti-
filmed in black and white, mism is built on a faith
their faces and hands in language as the site
painted in uncanny approx-
imations of living com- of communication and
plexions. Other transitions mutual recognition.
are so precisely matched to So follows his tragedy.
color and texture that they
seem extensions of a dream.
Patchworked from the scraps of a long century, this composite
view seems to bristle against a story of individual formation. It feels
like a strange time for an artist’s coming-of-age tale adapted with
such sincerity, especially when that central emphasis on becoming—
and becoming a writer, no less—is upended by geopolitical and eco-
logical hostility. At first, our young Martin strides on screen with all
the endearing curiosity of an archetypal naïf, played by Luca Marinelli
with a cannonballing force that still makes room for the gentler affects
of embarrassment and first love. Like the novel, the film begins with
a dockside rescue: early one morning, Martin saves a young aristocrat
from a beating, for which he is rewarded with lunch at the family
estate. On its storied grounds, Martin meets the stranger’s luminous
sister, Elena Orsini (Jessica Cressy), a blonde-haloed and silk-bloused
conduit for his twinned desires of knowledge and class transgression.
In rooms of ornate stucco and gilded everything, the Orsinis parade
their enthusiasm for education in a contrived show of open-minded-
ness, a familiar posture of well-meaning liberals who love to trumpet
a certain model of education as global panacea. University-educated
Elena can recite Baudelaire in French; Martin trips over simple
conjugations in his mother tongue. “You need money to study,” he
protests, after Elena prescribes him a back-to-school stint. “I’m sure
that your family would not ignore such an important objective,” she
insists (to an orphan, who first set sail at age 11).
Anyone who has ever been thrilled into critical pursuit by a
single moment of understanding knows the first beat of this story.
Bolting through book after book, Martin is fired by the ever-shift-
ing measure of his knowledge. In these limitless stretches of facts
to come, there’s the promised glow of sheer comprehension, the
way it clarifies the world as it intoxicates: “All hidden things were
laying their secrets bare. He was drunk with comprehension,”
writes London. Marcello is just as attentive to how Martin under-
stands, a process anchored to the past experiences of his working
3 4 | F IL M C OMMENT | January-February 2020
body. From his years of manual labor, he comes to knowledge in
a distinctly embodied way, charming by being so literal. At lunch
with the Orsinis, he offers a bread roll as a metaphor for educa-
tion and gestures at the sauce on his plate as “poverty,” tearing off
a piece of education and mopping up the remnants with relish.
Later, in a letter to Elena, he recounts his adventures in literacy:
“I note down new words, I turn them into my friends.” In these
early moments, his expressions are as playful as they are trenchant,
enlivened by newfound ways of articulating experience. His writ-
er’s optimism is built on a faith in language as the site of commu-
nication and mutual recognition. So follows his tragedy.
One of Marcello’s major structural decisions admittedly makes
for some final-act whiplash, when a cut elides the loaded years of
Martin’s incremental success, stratospheric fame, and present fall
into jaded torpor. By now, he is a bottle-blonde chain-smoker with
his own palazzo and entourage, set to leave on a U.S. press tour even
though he hasn’t written a thing in years. His ideas have been ampli-
fied to unprecedented reach by mass media, and his words circulate
as abstract commodities for a vulturine audience. For all its emphasis
on formation, Martin Eden is less a story of ebullient self-discovery
than one of inhibiting self-consciousness. There is no real sense that
Martin’s baseline character has changed, because it hasn’t. Even his
now best-selling writing is the stuff of countless prior rejected man-
uscripts. From that first day at the Orsini estate, when his roughness
sticks out to him as a fact, he learns about the gulf between a hardier
self-image and the surface self that’s eyed by others.
W
ith such a deeply inhabited performance
ALL PHOTOS BY FRANCESCA ERRICHIELLO/COURTESY OF KINO LORBER
by Marinelli, it’s intuitive to read the film as
a character study, but the lyrical interiority of
London’s novel never feels like the point of
Marcello’s adaptation. Archival clips—aged by
time, or a colorist’s hand—often seem to illus-
trate episodes from Martin’s past, punctuating the visual specificity of
individual memory: a tense encounter with his sister cuts to two chil-
dren dancing with joyous frenzy; his failed grammar-school entrance
exam finds its way to sepia-stained shots of a crippled, shoeless boy.
These insertions are more affective echoes than literal ones, the store
of a single life drawn from a pool of collective happening.
But, that catch: writing in the hopes of being read, as Martin
does (as most do), means feeding some construct of a distinctive
self. While the spotlight of celebrity singles out the destructive irony
of Martin’s aggressive individualism, Marcello draws from Italy’s
roiling history of anarchist and workerist movements to complicate
the film’s political critique, taking an itinerant path through factions
and waves from anarcho-communism in the early 1900s to the pro-
strike years of autonomist Marxism in the late ’70s. In place of crys-
talline messaging is a structure that parallels Martin’s own desultory
politics, traced in both film and novel through his commitment to
liberal theorist Herbert Spencer. Early on, Martin has an epiphanic
encounter with Spencer’s First Principles (a detail informed by Lon-
don’s own discovery of the text as a teen), which lays out a system-
atic philosophy of natural laws, and offers evolution as a structuring
principle for the universe—a “master-key,” London offers. Soon,
Martin bellows diatribes shaped by Spencer’s more divisive, social
Darwinist ideas of evolutionary justice, as though progress is only
possible through cruel ambivalence. Late in the film, an image of a
drunk and passed-out Martin cuts to yellowed footage of a young
boy penciling his name—“Martin Eden”—over and over in an
exercise book, a dream of becoming turned memory.
In Marcello’s previous feature, Lost and Beautiful (2015), memory
is more explicitly staged as an attachment to landscape. Like Alice
Rohrwacher’s Happy as Lazzaro, Lost and Beautiful plays as a pastoral
elegy but lays out the bureaucratic inefficiency that hastens heritage
loss through neglect. Rolling fields make occasional appearances
in Martin Eden, but its Neapolitan surroundings evoke a different
history. Far from the two oceans that inspired a North American
tradition of maritime literature, the Mediterranean guards its own
idiosyncrasies of promise and catastrophe. Of the Sea’s fraught func-
tion as a regional crossroads, Marcello has noted, in The Mouth of
the Wolf, a braiding of fate and agency: “They are men who trans-
migrate,” the opening voiceover intones. “We don’t know their
stories. We know they chose, found this place, not others.” Mare
Nostrum—“Our Sea”—is the Roman epithet for the Mediterranean,
a possessive projection that abides in current vernacular. Like so
many cities that cup the sea, Naples is a site of immigrant crossing, a
fact slyly addressed in Martin Eden with a fleeting long shot of black
workers barreling hay in a field of slanted sun, and, at the end, a
group of immigrants sitting on a beach at dusk. Brief, but enough to
mark the changing conditions of a new century.
Not much is really new, however: not the perils of migration, nor
the proselytizing individualists, nor the media circus, nor the classist
distortions of taste, nor, blessedly, the kind of learning for learning’s
sake that stokes and sustains an interest in the world. Toward the
end of the film, there is a shot of our tired once-hero, slumped in the
back seat of a car, that cuts to sepia stock of children laughing and
running to reach the camera-as-car-window, as if peering through
glass and time. It recalls a scene from Wim Wenders’s Wings of
Desire, which leaps backward through a similar gaze, when the weary
angel Cassiel looks out of a car window at the vista of ’80s Berlin and
sees, instead, grainy footage of postwar streets strewn with rubble in
fresh ruin. Where human perception is shackled to linearity, these
wool-coated and scarfed seraphs—a materialization of Walter Ben-
jamin’s “angel of history”—see all of time in a simultaneous sweep,
as they wander Berlin with their palliative touch. Marcello’s Martin
Eden mosaics a view less pointedly omniscient, but just as filled with
a humanist commitment to the turning world, even as Martin slides
into disillusion. All its faces plucked from history remind me of a line
from a Pasolini poem: “Everything on that street / was human, and
the people all clung / to it tightly.” O
Phoebe Chen is a writer and graduate student living in New York.

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January-February 2020 | F IL M C OMM ENT | 35

 S PECI AL SE CT ION

FILMS OF THE DECADE

It’s all over. Well, not quite, but the 2010s did come to an end

TOP LEFT: STRAND RELEASING/KOBAL/SHUTTERSTOCK; TOP RIGHT: KOMPLIZEN FILM/KOBAL/SHUTTERSTOCK; CENTER LEFT: COURTESY OF STRAND RELEASING; CENTER RIGHT: COURTESY OF CINÉART
on a note of pessimism about the world, and one of resignation
about the film industry’s consolidation and glut of choice. At
the same time, beyond the noise, filmmakers pushed cinema
to new and strange heights, shaping time and images and tell-
ing stories in novel ways. Our contributors look back at the
decade and try to make sense of it all.

Clockwise from top left: Zama, Toni Erdmann, Holy Motors, The Tree of Life, No Home Movie, Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives

3 6 | F I L M C OMM ENT | January-February 2020

Kevin Jerome Everson’s Tonsler Park
THE TERMITE’S RETURN
REFLECTING ON AN UNWIELDY
DECADE IN FILM, FROM THE
GROUND UP BY DENNIS LIM
H
ave we yet begun to trace the
shape of 21st-century cinema? The
previous decade’s retrospective
stock-taking resulted in the con-
secration of David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive
and Wong Kar Wai’s In the Mood for Love.
Consummate movie-movies lushly shot on
celluloid, both were already nearly a decade
old at the time, and even then seemed like
the last gasp of a previous century. The films
were themselves acts of mourning, for lost
loves, lost time, and the loss of a certain kind
of cinema. One story we could tell ourselves
about the 2010s is that nothing has emerged
to fill the void. Or rather, too many things
have. The defining qualities of the moment
are fragmentation and heterogeneity, a messy,
amorphous, contradictory too-muchness that
has made our waking life an overstimulating
hellscape and yet proved remarkably condu-
cive to artistic experimentation.
I attempted (and quickly abandoned)
the impossible exercise of compiling a list
of the films and filmmakers of the decade,
but two names came immediately to mind:
Hong Sangsoo and Kevin Jerome Everson.
Workhorses and visionaries both, Hong and
Everson are masters of casual formalism,
committed in different ways to a cinema of
the everyday. They achieve abundance—
Hong made 14 features in the 2010s; Everson
made about 100 films in all, mostly shorts—
through a reduction of means, and the frugal-
ity of their practice implicitly foregrounds the
economic imbalances that plague the field.
One might say they are true termite artists in
an age of rampaging white elephants.
The terms come from Manny Farber’s
classic manifesto “White Elephant Art vs. Ter-
mite Art,” and they strike me as an especially
useful paradigm for the current moment.
(An excellent recent MOCA show curated by
Helen Molesworth presented Farber’s own
paintings alongside a wide range of work that
could be said to evince termite-like character-
istics.) Farber’s essay, which dates from more
than half a century ago, is more suggestive
than definitive, and I have always found some
of his specific examples less convincing than
his vivid central dichotomy. Today, however,
it seems easier than ever to identify both
the white elephants for which art is (as he
put it) “an expensive hunk of well-regulated
area”—the prestige movie by the brand-name
auteur, the festival film with its pre-digested
meanings—and the countervailing termite
tendencies of work that “goes always forward
eating its own borundaries” and “feels its way
through walls of particularization.”
While feature-length films still govern
the conversation, some of the decade’s most
invigorating activity took place within the
ever-elastic short form, where a host of young
filmmakers—Gabriel Abrantes, Mati Diop,
Zachary Epcar, Laida Lertxundi, Camilo Re-
strepo, and James N. Kienitz Wilkins, to name
just a few—found tremendous opportunities
for freedom, reveling in the subversive and
January-February 2020 | F I LM C OM M EN T | 37
PERSONAL VIEWS
An assortment of filmmakers,
critics, and programmers pick
their way through the 2010s
NETA ALEXANDER
Critic, Haaretz
Top 10 Films (ranked)
Holy Motors, Toni Erdmann, Girlhood,
Margaret, The Act of Killing, Gett: The Trial
of Viviane Amsalem, Moonlight, Get Out,
Boyhood, Fire at Sea
Best New Filmmaker
Jordan Peele
INA DIANE ARCHER
Filmmaker; Conservator, Smithsonian
Top 10 Films (ranked)
Moonlight, Get Out, 12 Years a Slave, Us,
Flight, Black Panther, Fences, I Am Not Your
Negro, Precious, BlacKkKlansman
Top 10 Horror Films (ranked)
Berberian Sound Studio, The Babadook, Un-
der the Skin, Let Me In, A Girl Walks Home
Alone at Night, It Follows, The Witch, Raw,
Mother, Melancholia
Film of the Decade
Moonlight: I felt like I had never seen a
movie before.
ARI ASTER
Director, Midsommar
Films of the Decade (unranked)
45 Years, Amour, Another Year, Behind the
Candelabra, Beyond the Hills, Burning,
Cameraperson, Dogtooth, Final Cut: Ladies
and Gentlemen, Force Majeure, Four Lions,
The Handmaiden, Hard to Be a God, Holy
Motors, The Homesman, The Immigrant,
Inside Llewyn Davis, It’s Such a Beautiful
Day, Margaret: Director’s Cut, The Master,
No Home Movie, Nostalgia for the Light,
Parasite, Phantom Thread, Play, A Separation,
Silence, Stranger by the Lake, The Tree of
Life, Toni Erdmann, Uncle Boonmee Who
Can Recall His Past Lives, Under the Skin,
The Wailing, Winter Sleep, The Wolf of Wall
Street, Zama
SAM BARLOW
Designer, Telling Lies
Top 11 Films (unranked)
Elle, Nightcrawler, Parasite , Phantom
Thread, Shame, Silver Linings Playbook, The
Social Network, Under the Skin, Room, Up-
stream Color, You Were Never Really Here,
RAYMOND BELLOUR
Critic and author
 S PECI AL SE CT ION FI LMS OF THE DECA DE
PERSONAL VIEWS continued
Top 10 Films (ranked)
The Turin Horse, Restless, Mysteries of
Lisbon, Differently, Molussia, Holy Motors,
Photographic Memory, Leviathan, Once I
Entered a Garden, Goodbye to Language,
Boyhood
OPAL H. BENNETT
Producer, POV (PBS)
Top 10 Films (ranked)
Inception, A Prophet, Senna, A Separation,
The Interrupters, This Is Not a Film, Levia-
than (Paravel and Castaing-Taylor), Amour,
Beasts of the Southern Wild, Skyfall
CHRIS BOECKMANN
Director of Programming, True/False Film Fest
Top 10 Films (ranked)
Margaret, Stranger by the Lake, Call Me
by Your Name, Homeland: Iraq Year Zero,
Magic Mike XXL, Leviathan (Paravel and
Castaing-Taylor), Arabian Nights, The
Woolworths Choir of 1979, Of Men and War,
%GTVKƂGF%QR[
Best New Filmmakers (ranked)
Guido Hendrikx, Eduardo Williams, Mati
Diop, Roberto Minervini, Khalik Allah, Jodie
/CEM0CVJCP(KGNFGT/CFKPC/WUVCƂPC
Dieudo Hamadi, Rachel Rose, Véréna Para-
vel, Sergio Oksman, Michal Marczak, Renate
Costa, RaMell Ross, Marielle Heller, Rosine
Mbakam, Elizabeth Price, Adam and Zack
Khalil, Patrick Wang, Blake Williams
RICHARD BRODY
Critic, The New Yorker
Best New Filmmakers (unranked)
Khalik Allah, Zia Anger, Theo Anthony, Albert
Birney, Ryan Coogler, Ricky D’Ambrose, Mati
Diop, Sara Fattahi, Cristina Gallego, Aman-
dine Gay, Greta Gerwig, Marielle Heller, Eliza
Hittman, Kogonada, Penny Lane, Marie Losi-
er, Rosine Mbakam, Darius Clark Monroe,
Terence Nance, Nanfu Wang
CRISTINA CACIOPPO
Programmer, Alamo Drafthouse
Top 10 Films (ranked)
Magic Mike XXL, Jackass 3D, Bad Black, The
Love Witch, Flooding with Love for the Kid,
Happy as Lazzaro, 2.0, Unfriended, I’m Still
Here, Maps to the Stars
JOUMANE CHAHINE
Critic
Top 10 Films (ranked)
Amour, The Grand Budapest Hotel,
Phantom Thread, Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy,
Burning, The Image Book, Faust, Synonyms,
3 8 | F I LM C OMM ENT | January-February 2020
generative potential of ellipses and com-
pression whether working with narrative or
abstraction. An even more relevant question
than Bazin’s “What is cinema?” might now be
“Where is cinema?” And in response, leading
filmmakers like Apichatpong Weerasethakul,
Albert Serra, and Tsai Ming-liang have
extended their distinctive sensibilities into the
gallery, the theater, and the VR realm.
Some of the most ambitious features of
the decade enact a termitic burrowing into
and around subjects at once urgent and
elusive: the specter of historical trauma in
Anocha Suwichakornpong’s By the Time It
Gets Dark, and an ongoing social and political
emergency in Miguel Gomes’s Arabian
Nights. The latter also belongs to a very 2010s
category of work that assumes monumental
Arabian Nights
proportions while remaining termite-like in
its stubborn idiosyncrasy and irreducibility.
Other anti-elephantine epics: David Lynch’s
Twin Peaks: The Return, the ultimate singu-
larity; Hu Bo’s An Elephant Sitting Still, one of
the cinema’s great debuts and tragically also
one of its great final acts, a film that patiently
delineates an entire worldview; and Mariano
Llinás’s grand, mad adventure in scale and
duration, the playful and obdurate 14-hour-
plus La Flor, which has variously screened in
three parts, four parts, and eight parts, a one-
of-a-kind shape-shifter that is both modular
and unassimilable.
P
resenting his work at a film at
Lincoln Center retrospective in 2018,
Christian Petzold railed against a
type of festival film he described
as “the lemon-tree movie.” This would, as
Petzold derisively imagines it, involve two
lovers, one Palestinian and one Israeli, their
star-crossed romance represented by a lemon
tree situated right on the Gaza-Israel border.
(He may have had in mind an actual
Israeli movie called Lemon Tree, which has
a somewhat different plot but uses similar
botanical symbolism.) Anyone who has
sampled even a sliver of contemporary
world cinema will recognize this species
of “subject movie,” to use Petzold’s term.
These are films that are relentlessly about
something: laden with sociopolitical im-
port, allowing for a touch of lyricism but
very little ambiguity, and bearing the tell-
tale traces of the screenwriting workshop.
Petzold’s example gets at a rarely spoken
truth about the film-industrial complex.
While distinctive work is emerging all the
time, especially on the margins, and therefore
easy to overlook, many of the institutions that
determine what gets made and shown still
function as forces of homogenization, from
film schools to the funding bodies and devel-
opment labs that are sometimes attached to
the very festivals that serve as showcases for
the end results of this often highly profes-
sionalized process. Ours is an age of fatiguing
overload but also of numbing sameness: too
many movies, too many festivals, too many
reviews, too many opinions, too many lists,
too many hot takes and think pieces that turn
complicated issues into cultural talking points
and empty posturing—all of which amount
not to a lively discourse but a reinforcement
of conventional wisdom (or worse).
The abundance of the age is deceptive,
and it masks both structural limitations and
systems of control. Festival lineups often
reflect the distorting effects of premiere
policies and the compromises inherent in
relationship management. The purview of
film journalism is increasingly determined by
industry priorities, from release schedules to
what gets released at all, and tailored around
the actual or perceived incuriosity of editors
PHOTO COURTESY OF KINO LORBER
and readers. The brave new world of digital
streaming promises instant access, but choice
is a pernicious myth when entire swathes of
cinema are conveniently forgotten or actively
suppressed (as is happening with Disney’s
continued withholding of 20th Century Fox
titles from repertory theaters). Everything
is market-tested, only for us to be told that
what people want is more of the same. The
late-capitalist logic is seamless: what we get
THE 50 BEST FILMS OF THE DECADE* For Sama, National Gallery

ANDREW CHAN
1. Zama Lucrecia Martel, Argentina/Brazil/Spain, 2017
Web Editor, The Criterion Collection
2. Toni Erdmann Maren Ade, Germany, 2016 Top 15 Films (ranked)
3. Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives Apichatpong %GTVKƂGF%QR[, Stray Dogs, Happy Hour,
Weerasethakul, Thailand/UK/France, 2010 Toni Erdmann, Secret Sunshine, BPM (Beats
4. Holy Motors Leos Carax, France, 2012 Per Minute), Carol, ’Til Madness Do Us Part,
5. No Home Movie Chantal Akerman, Belgium/France, 2015 Moonlight, To Die Like a Man, The Strange
6. The Tree of Life Terrence Malick, USA, 2011 Little Cat, O.J.: Made in America, Certain
7. The Master Paul Thomas Anderson, USA, 2012 Women, Kaili Blues, This Is Not a Film
8. Phantom Thread Paul Thomas Anderson, USA/UK, 2017
9. Moonlight Barry Jenkins, USA, 2016 ASHLEY CLARK
Director, Film Programming, BAM
10. Boyhood Richard Linklater, USA, 2014
Top 10 Films (ranked)
11. Under the Skin Jonathan Glazer, UK/USA, 2014 Moonlight, The Nine Muses, Poetry, Toni
12. Carol Todd Haynes, UK/USA, 2015 Erdmann, #P1XGTUKORNKƂECVKQPQH*GT
13. Margaret Kenneth Lonergan, USA, 2011 Beauty, Ray & Liz, BPM (Beats Per Minute),
14. Leviathan Véréna Paravel & Lucien Castaing-Taylor, France/UK/USA, 2012 Locke, Timbuktu, Hale County This Morning,
15. The Turin Horse Béla Tarr & Ágnes Hranitzky, Hungary, 2011 This Evening
16. Inside Llewyn Davis Joel & Ethan Coen, USA, 2013 Best New Filmmakers (ranked)
17. Mysteries of Lisbon Raúl Ruiz, Portugal/France, 2010 Terence Nance, Charlie Shackleton, RaMell
18. Burning Lee Chang-dong, South Korea, 2018 Ross, Garrett Bradley, Mati Diop, Richard
Billingham
19. The Act of Killing Joshua Oppenheimer, Denmark/Norway/UK, 2013
Observation on the decade:
20. Parasite Bong Joon Ho, South Korea, 2019 Random Acts of Flyness. A beautiful, unclas-
21. %GTVKƂGF%QR[Abbas Kiarostami, France/Italy/Belgium, 2010 UKƂCDNGDNCUVQHDNCEMUWDLGEVKXKV[GZRNQFKPI
22. The Assassin Hou Hsiao-hsien, Taiwan/China/Hong Kong, 2015 staid notions of gender, sexuality, race, and
23. Tabu Miguel Gomes, Portugal, 2012 form, it was perhaps my favorite piece of
24. Mad Max: Fury Road George Miller, USA, 2015 moving-image art of the decade, and it
25. First Reformed Paul Schrader, USA, 2017 moved me deeply, too. It is, to date, the
26. Get Out Jordan Peele, USA, 2017 OQUVUWUVCKPGFCPFJKIJRTQƂNGGZRNQUKQP
27. Stray Dogs Tsai Ming-liang, Taiwan/France, 2013 of creativity from a new generation of black
#OGTKECPƂNOOCMKPIVCNGPV
UGGCNUQVJG
28. Stranger by the Lake Alain Guiraudie, France, 2013
New Negress Film Society) who, taking a
29. Cemetery of Splendor Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Thailand/
cue from the L.A. Rebellion before it, are
UK/France, 2015 KPXGUVGFKPSWGUVKQPKPIƂNOoUECRCEKV[HQT
30. A Touch of Sin Jia Zhangke, China, 2013 liberatory, socially transformative art.
31. Timbuktu Abderrahmane Sissako, France/Mauritania, 2014
32. Goodbye to Language Jean-Luc Godard, France, 2014 K. AUSTIN COLLINS
33. In Jackson Heights Frederick Wiseman, USA, 2015 Critic, Vanity Fair
34. The Social Network David Fincher, USA, 2010 Top 30 Films (unranked)
35. Faces Places Agnès Varda & JR, France, 2017 The Act of Killing (director’s cut), Carol,
36. The Wolf of Wall Street Martin Scorsese, USA, 2013 The Day He Arrives, Did You Wonder Who
Fired the Gun?, Drug War, Field Niggas,
37. ROMA Alfonso Cuarón, Mexico, 2018
Frances Ha, The Future, Gone Girl, Happy
38. A Separation Asghar Farhadi, Iran, 2011 Hour, Heaven Knows What, In Jackson
39. Horse Money Pedro Costa, Portugal, 2014 Heights, Inside Llewyn Davis, It Felt Like
40. Phoenix Christian Petzold, Germany, 2014 Love, Leviathan (Paravel and Castaing-Tay-
41. Certain Women Kelly Reichardt, USA, 2016 lor), Like Someone in Love, Mad Max: Fury
42. This Is Not a Film Jafar Panahi & Mojtaba Mirtahmasb, Iran, 2012 Road, Margaret, The Master, The Missing
43. Happy as Lazzaro Alice Rohrwacher, Italy/Switzerland/France, 2018 Picture, Moonlight, Sunset Song, Timbuktu,
44. The Strange Case of Angelica Manoel de Oliveira, Portugal, 2010 A Touch of Sin, The Tree of Life, Universal
45. Cameraperson Kirsten Johnson, USA, 2016 Soldier: Day of Reckoning, Unstoppable,
Upstream Color, The Wind Rises, The Wolf
46. Hard to Be a God Aleksey German, Russia, 2015
of Wall Street
47. Poetry Lee Chang-dong, South Korea, 2011
48. La Flor Mariano Llinás, Argentina, 2018 JORDAN CRONK
49. Western Valeska Grisebach, Germany/Bulgaria, 2018 Critic and programmer, Acropolis Cinema
50. Elle Paul Verhoeven, France/Germany/Belgium, 2016 Top 10 Films (ranked)
#UXQVGFWRQPD[CPKPVGTPCVKQPCNITQWRQHETKVKEURTQITCOOGTUCPFƂNOOCMGTU Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past

January-February 2020 | F I LM C OM M ENT | 3 9

 S PECI AL SE CT ION FI LMS OF THE DECA DE
PERSONAL VIEWS continued
Lives, The Strange Case of Angelica, Good-
bye to Language, No Home Movie, House
of Tolerance, Mysteries of Lisbon, Horse
Money, Holy Motors, The Turin Horse, Once
Upon a Time in Anatolia
Best New Filmmakers (ranked)
Jodie Mack, Nadav Lapid, Ben Rivers,
Roberto Minervini, Oliver Laxe, Eduardo
Williams, Bi Gan, Kleber Mendonça Filho,
Mati Diop, Dane Komljen
Film of the Decade
Pain & Gain: no movie captured the tragic
essence of unchecked American capitalism
more vividly.
Film Person of the Decade
Sensory Ethnography Lab
Best Experimental Films (unranked)
Differently, Molussia, Engram of Return-
ing, Episode of the Sea, The Extravagant
Shadows, Let Your Light Shine, L.COHEN,
Leviathan (Paravel and Castaing-Taylor),
PROTOTYPE, The Realist, Slow Action
GIULIA D’AGNOLO VALLAN
Critic and programmer
Top 10 Films (ranked)
Get Out, Bone Tomahawk, WALL-E, The
Social Network, Twin Peaks: The Return,
Thor: Ragnarok, Certain Women, Detroit,
Toy Story 3, The Good Dinosaur
Best New Filmmakers (ranked)
Ana Lily Amirpour, Brady Corbet, Pippa Bian-
co, S. Craig Zahler, Ryan Coogler, Josephine
Decker, Jordan Peele, Roberto Minervini,
Damien Chazelle, Alma Har’el, Terence
Nance, Chloé Zhao, Jennifer Kent
MANOHLA DARGIS
Co-Chief Film Critic, The New York Times
Top 10 Films (unranked)
The Assassin, Boyhood, Faces Places, In Jack-
son Heights, Luminous Intimacy: The Cinema
of Nathaniel Dorsky and Jerome Hiler [NYFF
2015 retro], Mad Max: Fury Road, No Home
Movie, Poetry, 13th, A Touch of Sin
NICK DAVIS
Associate Professor, Northwestern University
Top 10 Films (ranked)
Arabian Nights, Western, 20th Century
Women, The Tree of Life, Silvered Water,
Syria Self-Portrait, At Berkeley, If Beale Street
Could Talk, Tabu, Amour, Sleeping Beauty
Best New Filmmakers (ranked)
Alice Rohrwacher, Jayro Bustamante, Rober-
to Minervini, Marielle Heller, Feras Fayyad,
Khalik Allah, Shahrbanoo Sadat, Ryan
Coogler, László Nemes, J.P. Sniadecki
Film of the Decade
40 | F IL M C O MMEN T | January-February 2020
is not, as advertised, plenitude, but its precise
opposite, a narrowing of options to an algo-
rithmically determined menu and a simulta-
neous impression that no other options exist.
I
n a decade drowning in images, can
we even say which ones are emblematic?
Which films attempted, or sought to
comprehend, new ways of seeing (and
hearing)? In this regard, one of the decade’s
most enduring achievements has to be
Véréna Paravel and Lucien Castaing-Taylor’s
Leviathan, a radical experiment in sub-
jectivity and embodiment that in a single
stroke reunites the once strongly conjoined
documentary and avant-garde traditions. The
unthinkable volume of images in circula-
By the Time It Gets Dark
tion today has prompted Lucrecia Martel to
declare that, were she just starting out, she
would not make new images but edit existing
ones. The decade saw extraordinary compi-
lation films by Sergei Loznitsa and Andrei
Ujica, and one brilliant twist on the form in
Shengze Zhu’s Present.Perfect., which uses not
found but live-streamed footage, and locates
within our present surfeit of images new
registers of performance and perhaps new
forms of empathy.
Nearly two decades after 9/11, are we any
closer to understanding what it means for
catastrophe and conflict to be immediately
absorbed into the realm of images? Our
daily lives are now punctuated by videos of
extreme violence, captured on surveillance
cameras or streamed from war zones, and
further complicating the ethical stakes, but
this now-familiar imagery also has the po-
tential to be read or reimagined as cinematic
language, as in Loznitsa’s Maidan and Ossa-
ma Mohammed and Wiam Simav Bedirx-
an’s Silvered Water, Syria Self-Portrait. For a
guide to contemporary (and indeed the last
century’s) visual culture, you could do worse
than 89-year-old Jean-Luc Godard, whose
astonishing decade began with Film socialisme
and ended with The Image Book, a film-essay
on the violence of representation dense with
repurposed and manipulated images.
No film of the 2010s came closer to the
texture of contemporary lived experience
than Eduardo Williams’s The Human Surge,
which captures a mode of apprehending,
moving through, and relating to the world—
ambivalently connected, hyperalert yet dis-
tractible—that is absolutely of the moment.
(This most termite-like of films also happens
to include one bravura transition sequence
involving a pissed-on anthill.) In the fictional
realm, Bertrand Bonello’s Nocturama
describes a world of absolute capitalism,
impotent fury, and nihilist ultraviolence in
which belief systems have become brands—a
world that is unmistakably ours.
What lingers most from my moviegoing
decade is not a type of image or a mode
of visuality but an experience of time—or
rather, many different experiences of time.
Cinema has always been capable of conjuring
multiple temporalities, so it is perhaps to be
expected that this formal dimension would
become more pronounced as our relationship
with time is reshaped. Digital has expanded
the possibilities of duration, as in the work
of James Benning and Albert Serra, and over
the 18 hours of Twin Peaks: The Return, in
which time itself seems to dilate. To a startling
degree, many of my favorite recent films en-
gage in plays of temporality both subtle and
radical: the sly and deranging anachronisms
PHOTO COURTESY OF DOGWOOF
of Zama, the short-circuiting of time in Kaili
Blues, the conflicting temporal markers in
Martin Eden, the sleight-of-hand time travel
of Happy as Lazzaro, and the multiple coex-
isting time frames of Petzold’s Transit, a ghost
story in which the past and the present haunt
one another. The most exciting films of the
decade made tangible the notion of cinema as
a time machine. z

Give Me Liberty
COUNTING YOUR BLESSINGS
WHAT ON EARTH ARE WE DOING
MAKING LISTS? BY AMY TAUBIN
I
must have been feeling guiltier
than usual about my “top 10 films”
list to have suggested to my editor
that I write a piece about the end-of-
the-year (and end-of-the-decade) ritual.
The guilt is not about the films I named
and, more absurdly, placed in “most best”
to “least best” order. It is, rather, about
the films I left out. Like many critics, I
take seriously the opportunity to ensure
that films I care about have some small
mention in film history. I don’t worry
much about films that have wide support,
although I can’t ignore them and some-
times don’t want to. The critical consen-
sus is around Parasite, and as a result of
appearing on so many lists and winning
so many critics’ and festival awards,
the director Bong Joon Ho is close to a
household name. But I’d also like to think
that because Kirill Mikhanovsky’s wildly
original and humane Give Me Liberty is
still playing in theaters, someone might
see it on my list and buy a ticket.
Because come December, almost every
PHOTO COURTESY OF MUSIC BOX FILMS
person I encounter asks me what movies
are on my top 10. In 2019, as always, I try
to expand the definition of “cinema” by
mixing experimental films and installation
work—Ken Jacobs’s The Sky Socialist:
Environs and Out-Takes (1964-66/2019)
and Arthur Jafa’s The White Album
(2019)—with theatrical features and doc-
umentaries. I apologize for failing to keep
an impulsive Twitter promise to include
a 30-second video of an owl mounting
an all-out attack on the lens of a surveil-
lance camera in which he must have seen
his reflection. Chris Marker would have
loved it, but at a moment of cinematic
abundance, there is no room for non-hu-
man creative artists. I have more serious
regrets about the omission of at least five
documentaries: Beniamino Barrese’s The
Disappearance of My Mother, Nanfu Wang
and Jialing Zhang’s One Child Nation,
Julia Reichert and Steven Bognar’s Amer-
ican Factory, Waad al-Kateab and Edward
Watts’s For Sama, and Feras Fayyad’s The
Cave. They are all wonderful movies; they
all bear witness to people and situations
that we need to see and hear about; and
they potentially will inspire viewers to
take action or to act differently in both
the most intimate parts of our lives and
in those aspects of the world that, despite
their seeming distance, we ignore at peril
to our humanity. Indeed they are all such
moving and intelligent films that to count
them as mere runners-up makes me liter-
ally queasy about my preference for films
that excite me aesthetically—in other
words, through their cinematic form.
Which is why I was thrilled by a non-
fiction film that collapses all of these
seemingly warring criteria into the most
revelatory movie I saw this year. Ljubomir
Stefanov and Tamara Kotevska’s Honey-
land begins as a portrait of a middle-aged
Macedonian beekeeper who is believed
to be the last woman to practice sustain-
able honey-gathering in Europe. Hatidze
January-February 2020 | F ILM C OMME NT | 41
The Arabian Nights trilogy, for its sheer level
of risk, scope, uniqueness, and prodigious
accomplishment.
Film Person of the Decade
Ava DuVernay, no question. Or can you think
of someone else who released four scripted
features, a documentary, and a limited
series, ranging from the intimate to the epic;
OCFGUGXGTCNKPƃWGPVKCNCFUCPFOWUKEXKF-
eos; executive-produced multiple episodic
series and recruited a seven-nation army
of women directors; distributed dozens of
features by marginalized artists through her
own company; opened her own theater and
started her own festival; connected everyday
people with prominent artists, offering her
audiences free mentoring; used Twitter not
only as a promotion tool but also a public
good; intervened meaningfully in industry
dialogues around justice, inclusion, and
the new streaming economy; and, having
accomplished all this, seemed to spend
most of her time spotlighting everybody
else’s achievements? I’ll wait.
SHONNI ENELOW
Associate Professor, Fordham University
Top 10 Films (ranked)
Aquarius, Toni Erdmann, Moonlight, The Sou-
venir, Phantom Thread, No Home Movie, Un-
cle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives,
First Reformed, The Immigrant, Boyhood
Film of the Decade
Get Out
SCOTT FOUNDAS
Senior Manager, Acquisitions/Production,
Amazon Studios Original Movies
Top 25 Films of the Decade (unranked)
Amour, The Autobiography of Nicolae
Ceaus,escu, The Assassin, Barbara, Dunkirk,
Goodbye to Language, Her, Holy Motors,
The Immigrant, Mad Max: Fury Road,
Margaret, The Master, Moonlight, Mysteries
of Lisbon, Norte, the End of History, Once
Upon a Time… in Hollywood, Parasite, Po-
etry, The Social Network, Toni Erdmann, The
Tree of Life, The Turin Horse, Uncle Boon-
mee Who Can Recall His Past Lives, Vitalina
Varela, The Wind Rises
Best New Filmmakers (unranked)
Rick Alverson, Ari Aster, Kantemir Balagov, Clio
Barnard, Kim Bora, Ryan Coogler, Joe Cornish,
Destin Daniel Cretton, Robert Eggers, Alex
Garland, Marielle Heller, Jennifer Kent, Nadav
Lapid, László Nemes, Joshua Oppenheimer,
Andrew Patterson, Jordan Peele, Alice Rohr-
wacher, Lulu Wang, Nanfu Wang
Film of the Decade
Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood: a movie
that, in content and form, feels like a
 S PECI AL SE CT ION FI LMS OF THE DECA DE
PERSONAL VIEWS continued
GWNQI[HQTVJGCVTKECNƂNOIQKPICUCEQNNGEVKXG
pastime and for the auteur (as opposed
to corporate-branded) “event” movie. It is
Tarantino at once pulling back the curtain on
his own creative process, dazzling us anew,
and bidding adieu. A Sunset Boulevard for
the Marvel/streaming era.
DEVIKA GIRISH
Assistant Editor, Film Comment
Top 25 Films (unranked)
Before Midnight, Brooklyn, Burning, Cam-
GTCRGTUQP%GTVKƂGF%QR[%NQWFUQH5KNU
Maria, Computer Chess, Fandry, Get Out,
Good Time, Hale County This Morning, This
Evening, Happy as Lazzaro, Magic Mike, Mil-
la, Mistress America, Moonlight, No Home
Movie, Once Upon a Time in Anatolia, Right
Now, Wrong Then, This Is Not a Film, Toni
Erdmann, Transit, Uncle Boonmee Who Can
Recall His Past Lives, Western, Zama
Film Person of the Decade
Danny Glover. In addition to his cameos in
Sorry to Bother You and The Dead Don’t Die,
Louverture Films (which he co-founded with
,QUN[P$CTPGURTQFWEGFƂNOUD[.WETGEKC
Martel, RaMell Ross, Apichatpong Weer-
asethakul, Yance Ford, Nadine Labaki...
JESSICA GREEN
Artistic Director, The Houston Cinema Arts
Society
Top 10 Films (ranked)
The Master, I Am Not Your Negro, Parasite,
Carlos, Under the Skin, Stories We Tell,
Uncut Gems, Get Out, Winter’s Bone, The
Black Power Mixtape 1967–1975
Best New Filmmakers (ranked)
Ryan Coogler, Jill Soloway, Trey Edward
Shults, Jordan Peele, Yance Ford, Benh
Zeitlin, Tanya Hamilton, Justin Simien, Greta
Gerwig, Lotfy Nathan
ROBERT GREENE
Director, Kate Plays Christine; editor; Assis-
tant Professor, Missouri School of Journalism
Top 10 Films (ranked)
Twin Peaks: The Return, The Act of Killing
(director’s cut)/The Look of Silence,
Cameraperson, %GTVKƂGF%QR[, Leviathan
(Paravel and Castaing-Taylor), Margaret,
The Master, The Arbor, National Gallery/In
Jackson Heights, Heaven Knows What
MOLLY HASKELL
Critic and author
Top 15 Films (ranked)
Poetry, Boyhood, After the Storm, The Day
He Arrives, The Act of Killing, Barbara,
4 2 | F ILM CO M MENT | January-February 2020
Muratova’s weathered, sharp-featured
face mirrors the arid, rocky landscape that
surrounds her nearly abandoned moun-
tain village, and the filmmakers revel in
the visual connection of the woman to the
natural world. As the situation develops
in a way that they could not have antici-
pated, and Hatidze’s bees are threatened
by the greed and stupidity of a nomadic
cattle-breeding family, we realize that we
are watching, in microcosm, a woman’s
struggle against the rampant capitalism
that is hurtling us toward the sixth extinc-
tion.
It goes without saying that all criticism
involves personal taste. The most useful
aspect of list-making is that it forces one
to confront why one values one movie
more than another: what makes certain
movies resonate at particular moments
in one’s own history and the history of
the world. It is not a coincidence that, for
me, Honeyland is the movie of the year,
and Agnieszka Holland’s 2017 Spoor,
which is about a woman who takes upon
herself the guardianship—by any means
necessary—of a primeval forest and all
the creatures living within it, is the movie
of the decade. In The Great Derangement:
Climate Change and the Unthinkable, the
Indian novelist Amitav Ghosh writes:
“In a substantially altered world, when
sea-level rise has swallowed the Sundar-
bans and made cities like Kolkata, New
York, and Bangkok uninhabitable, when
readers and museum-goers turn to the
art and literature of our time, will they
not look, first and most urgently, for
traces and portents of the altered world of
their inheritance? And when they fail to
Honeyland
Spoor
find them, what should they—what can
they—do other than conclude that ours
was a time when most forms of art and
literature were drawn into the modes of
concealment that prevented people from
recognizing the realities of their plight?
Quite possibly, then, this era, which so
congratulates itself on its self-awareness,
will come to be known as the time of the
Great Derangement.”
There is nothing deranged about Hon-
eyland and Spoor. They go straight to the
heart of the all-encompassing problem
and refuse to give up. But there are other
films on other lists that someone might
find after the floods and famines and
mass migrations, and understand that
friendship, love, and solidarity were tools
and reasons for survival (For Sama and
Give Me Liberty) and that while Parasite
and Us were cautionary tales for both
rich and poor, the spectacle of the poor
preying on one another was the most hor-
rifying. And also that, as in Jacobs’s The
Sky Socialist and Jean-Luc Godard’s The
Image Book, the act of capturing images
from a vanishing world sometimes yields
a vison of utopia. z
SPOOR: © FILM KINO TEXT; HONEYLAND: COURTESY OF NEON

Cameraperson
LETTER TO AN UNKNOWN DECADE
BECOMING A CRITIC IN AN ERA OF
BURGEONING POSSIBILITY AND UN-
SETTLING FUTURES BY DEVIKA GIRISH
B
y most accounts, cinema
shrank Benjamin Button–style
in the 2010s. Movies, once larger
than life, became portable, fold-
able, and smaller than your palm. But my
history of cinema—and my own, individ-
ual cinephilia—progressed in the other,
“correct” direction. In 2019, my defining
cinematic experiences were on the big
screen: the longing-soaked oceans and
electronic rhythms of Mati Diop’s Atlantics
washing over me in a theater in Toronto;
the lush colors and outsize emotions of
Greta Gerwig’s Little Women holding me
in thrall in a screening room in New York.
In 2010, when I was a 14-year-old in a
small city in central India, my most thrill-
ing movie experience was watching The
Social Network via a Torrented file on my
laptop, obsessively pausing and rewinding
and replaying the film to parse what Aar-
on Sorkin’s rapid-fire dialogue and David
Fincher’s frenzied, cross-cutting storytell-
ing had to say about the world around me
and the world soon to come.
I begin with this personal anecdote
PHOTO COURTESY OF JANUS FILMS
to concede, preemptively, the futility of
any attempt at reckoning authoritative-
ly with a decade of cinema. This is not
just because 10 years is a long time, but
because such periodizations of culture
leave unaddressed questions of place and
experience. Becoming a cinephile across
two continents this past decade has made
me acutely aware of both the disorienting
(and unequal) multiplicities of histories
being written at any given time, and the
corporate homogeneity that dissolves
them into totalizing master-discourses.
This is true even—or rather, especially—
in today’s moment of seeming plenitude,
access, and interconnectedness, which
Fincher’s film telegraphed with such chill-
ing prescience in 2010. In the resulting in-
discriminate glut, only metrics and trends
and consensus narratives (all of which are
usually inextricable from a profit motive)
rise to the surface.
Last February, I had the rare but dis-
tinct feeling that I was in the presence of
history-in-the-making when I attended a
two-day, conference-style event at Barnard
College and the New School, called the
“Dalit Film and Cultural Festival.” Cel-
ebrating an emerging, radical new wave
of cinema by filmmakers from India’s
marginalized Dalit or “untouchable” caste,
the festival was the first of its kind, and the
two seminal films it showcased—Fandry
(2013), by Marathi filmmaker Nagraj
Manjule, and Kaala (2018), by Tamil di-
rector Pa. Ranjith—struck me as decade-
defining achievements by most yard-
sticks. Fandry turns rage into poetry, its
lyrical, ethnographic portrait of injustice
ending with a rock hurled at the screen;
Kaala culminates in a setpiece that turns
class solidarity into a thrilling, fantastical
spectacle of music and color. Seamlessly
combining popular forms with both lived
experience and an erudite politics, they’re
sui generis works, and watching the young
January-February 2020 | F ILM C OMM ENT | 4 3
In Jackson Heights, Zama, Toni Erdmann,
This Is Not a Film, Amour, Winter’s Bone, A
Prophet, Mother, Faces Places
LILI HINSTIN
Artistic Director, Locarno Film Festival
Top 10 Films (ranked)
The Strange Case of Angelica, Staying
Vertical, The Image Book, Certain Women,
Happy Hour, Western, Detroit, Vitalina
Varela, mother!, Holy Motors
Best New Filmmakers (unranked)
Eric Baudelaire, Bi Gan, Mati Diop, Camila
José Donoso, Ted Fendt, Hassen Ferhani,
Matjaz Ivanisin, Jang Woo-jin, Radu Jude,
Damien Manivel, Kleber Mendonça Filho,
João Nicolau, André Novais Oliveira, Alex
Ross Perry, Bill & Turner Ross, Kiro Russo,
Josh & Benny Safdie, Song Fang, Nadège
Trebal, Virgil Vernier
J. HOBERMAN
Critic and author
Top 10 Films (ranked)
The Clock, Gravity, Wormwood, No Home
Movie, Zama, The Assassin, Goodbye to
Language, Toni Erdmann, The Master, Son
of Saul
Best New Filmmakers (unranked)
Ana Lily Amirpour, Bi Gan, Lucien
Castaing-Taylor, Ryan Coogler, Robert
Eggers, Hu Bo, Jennifer Kent, Nadav Lapid,
Sergei Loznitsa, Pietro Marcello, László
Nemes, Jordan Peele
Film of the Decade
The Avengers: The movie that reclaimed
9/11 as entertainment and, enjoying the
biggest North American opening to date,
suggested that, more than a passing Bush-
era fancy, comic-book superheroics were the
new face of digital cinema.
Film Person of the Decade
Stan Lee: Back in the Pop Art ’60s, Alain
Resnais proposed a collaboration with the
Marvel mogul, never dreaming that he might
be 50 years too early.
ERIC HYNES
Curator, Museum of the Moving Image
Top 10 Films (ranked)
The Act of Killing/The Look of Silence, Ev-
eryone Else, Holy Motors, The Tree of Life,
Cameraperson, Inside Llewyn Davis, Uncle
Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives,
Dead Souls, The Wolf of Wall Street, Carlos
$GUV0QPƂEVKQP(GCVWTGU(ranked)
The Look of Silence, The Act of Killing,
Cameraperson, Dead Souls, Hale County
This Morning, This Evening, The Autobi-
ography of Nicolae Ceaus,escu, Leviathan,
Actress, The Interrupters, The Work,
 S PECI AL SE CT ION FI LMS OF THE DECA DE
PERSONAL VIEWS continued
In Jackson Heights, 20,000 Days on Earth,
The Arbor, Voyage of Time: Life’s Journey,
Fire at Sea, Maidan, Contemporary Color,
Ex Libris, Only the Young, The Overnight-
ers, Stories We Tell, We Come as Friends,
Under the Sun, Strong Island, Manakamana
AZADEH JAFARI
Critic (Iran)
Top 10 Films (ranked)
Holy Motors, White Material, The Master,
Phoenix, The Assassin, Zama, House of
Tolerance, Sieranevada, The Tree of Life,
Toni Erdmann
Film Person of the Decade
Agnès Varda
NELLIE KILLIAN
Programmer; contributing editor, Film
Comment
Top 25 Films (unranked)
Barbara, A Bread Factory, By the Time It
Gets Dark, Cemetery of Splendor, Down-
sizing, Elle, Heart of a Dog, Jackass 3D,
Let the Sunshine In, Like Someone in Love,
Madeline’s Madeline, Maps to the Stars,
Margaret, Mission: Impossible—Ghost Pro-
tocol, Mysteries of Lisbon, No Home Movie,
1HƂEG1WT6KOG1XGTVJG;GCTU2QGVT[6JG
Social Network, Timbuktu, Twin Peaks: The
Return, The Wolf of Wall Street, You Ain’t
Seen Nothin’ Yet
Best New Filmmaker
James N. Kienitz Wilkins
Film of the Decade
Downsizing: relentlessly surprising, funny,
ambitious, idiosyncratic, fully committed to
realizing its silly premise in exquisite detail,
laser-focused in its diagnosis of the partic-
ularities of contemporary American anxiety
and despair.
Most Exciting Short/Nonfeature Directors
(unranked)
Luke Fowler, Jay Giampietro, Beatrice Gib-
son, Sky Hopinka, Laida Lertxundi, Tomonari
Nishikawa, Sondra Perry, Rachel Rose, Ryan
Trecartin, James N. Kienitz Wilkins
MICHAEL KORESKY
Critic and author; editor, Reverse Shot;
co-director, Feast of the Epiphany
Top 20 Films (ranked)
The Tree of Life, Another Year, Uncle
Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives,
The Souvenir, Boyhood, A Quiet Passion,
Beyond the Hills, Toni Erdmann, Zama, By
the Time It Gets Dark, No Home Movie,
Aquarius, Carol, Poetry, Cameraperson,
Inside Llewyn Davis, The Look of Silence,
4 4 | F I L M C O MM EN T | January-February 2020
Moonlight
directors present them to a visibly moved
audience, I felt like I was witnessing a
revolution. But then I left the event and
went downtown to Metrograph to watch
a live broadcast of the Academy Awards,
in whose obit reel I noticed the absence
of two recently passed titans of Indian
cinema, Sridevi and Mrinal Sen. And I
confronted the realization that one per-
son’s revolution is barely a blip in another
person’s canon.
All of which is to say that any account-
ing of the past decade of cinema must
start with the question: whose decade? And
whose cinema? Becoming a critic (and
thus, a historian) in the last 10 years has
meant negotiating that elusive threshold
where the personal, the marginal, and
the vernacular turn into the historical.
One of the defining images of my decade,
and one which illustrates this need for
particularity with stunning intelligence, is
from Kirsten Johnson’s 2016 documentary
Cameraperson. A shot of a vast gray sky in
Missouri is ruptured by a bolt of light-
ning—which elicits a gasp from behind
the camera, and then a series of sneezes
that make the whole image quiver, unbal-
anced. The many such gestures of affect
Kaala
and intervention that Johnson weaves into
her cine-memoir dismantle assumptions
about objectivity and authorship to create
an alternate record of image-making—one
which recognizes that images are neces-
sarily contingent, caught in irreproducible
(and ultimately unrecordable) webs of
time and place and persons. I keep her
film in mind as a guide for my criticism: a
reminder that to write about movies is to
write about our encounters with them—to
not just contemplate the sky and its bursts
of lightning but also to tell the story of
one’s gasps and sneezes, even if they end
up on the floor of history’s editing room.
I
encountered christian petzold’s
Transit earlier this year on a flight
from Berlin to Los Angeles. (So much
for my big-screen cinephilia!) And
walking in and out of immigration at
both airports, I felt the ghosts of the
film’s Kafkaesque bureaucracy of borders
around me, unchanged yet sharpened into
something new. Transit is one of many MOONLIGHT: DAVID BORNFRIEND/KOBAL/SHUTTERSTOCK
films from the last few years that contend
with the flows of people and capital that
characterize contemporary life—flows
that dissolve borders in some ways, while
reifying them in others. These movies
examine the intersections and perversities
of globalization, challenging our ideas
of nationhood and national cinemas. In
Valeska Grisebach’s magnificent Western
(2017), a German construction worker
stationed in a Bulgarian border-village is
alienated by the jingoism of his colleagues
and filled with longing for the communal
bonds of the locals. In American Factory
(2019), Julia Reichert and Steven Bognar
capture the degradations of multinational
capitalism, while Nadav Lapid’s Synonyms witnessing the meteoric rise of a major End of the Century, Closed Curtain,
(2019) wrestles with the corruptions of talent in real time. Lincoln
nationalisms in its protagonist’s tortured Most of us were awed by Jenkins’s film, Best New Filmmakers (unranked)
linguistic efforts to assimilate in France. but one young contrarian in our group Ari Aster, Robin Campillo, Lucio Castro,
And Lucrecia Martel’s monumental Zama complained that he felt it “didn’t make Stephen Cone, Mati Diop, Ezra Edelman,
(2017)—my film of the decade—is closely room” for him. In retrospect, his com- Kirsten Johnson, Dee Rees, Alice Rohrwa-
attuned to the nuances (and violences) ment seems to me to reflect how unusual cher, Eduardo Williams
of seeing and speaking across cultures, it was at the time for a film as accessible Film Person of the Decade
unearthing colonialism and its bloody as Moonlight—a quintessentially Amer- $CEMKP$TKVKUJƂNOOCMGT,QCPPC
migrations as the foundational logic of ican coming-of-age melodrama—to not *QIIOCFGJGTƂTUVHGCVWTGtVJGGZEQTK-
Latin America. offer all its viewers the classical, humanist ating UnrelatedtCVCIGYJKEJKURTKOG
Beyond our notions of place, these pleasures of identification. Instead, it GXKFGPEGQHVJGDGPGƂVUQHYCKVKPIWPVKN
films also complicate our notions of iden- demanded an awareness of one’s social you’re ready. This decade, she’s had a
tity, embracing the particular rather than position as spectator, as does the work TGOCTMCDNGTWPtArchipelago, Exhibition,
striving for universality—an illusory stan- of Terence Nance and Jordan Peele to and The Souvenir—but before and during
dard applied unfairly, even now, to films different (but equally masterful) ends. all this, Hogg has also been a tireless cine-
whose subjects are not white, Western, Many other films that left an impression phile, curator, exhibitor, and, in 2011, the
heterosexual, normative. The most influ- on me this past decade did something co-founder of the À Nos Amours cinema
ential movies of the last decade have been similar: they didn’t necessarily make me collective, which champions and screens
defiantly specific, refusing to compromise “feel seen”—i.e., succeed in the noble, but TCTGCPFWPFGTCRRTGEKCVGFƂNOUKPENWFKPI
the rootedness of their perspective to often superficial, goal of representation— VJGYQTMQH%JCPVCN#MGTOCP/C[CNNƂNO-
pander to a broader audience. Barry Jen- but they revealed to me how I see. Certain makers also be such inspiring advocates.
kins is a practitioner par excellence of this images from Jonathan Glazer’s Under the Top 10 Queer Films (unranked)
tendency: his Oscar-winning Moonlight, Skin (2013) are nestled deep in my mind, Beyond the Hills, BPM (Beats Per Minute),
embroidered exquisitely with the sonic haunting me with their profound dena- Carol, End of the Century, Moonlight, No
and visual details of his and screenwriter turing of the experience of perceiving Home Movie, Pariah, A Quiet Passion,
Tarell Alvin McCraney’s lives in Florida, the world, and being perceived by it, as Stranger by the Lake, Weekend
introduced new idioms of possibility into a woman. Magic Mike (2012) and Magic
the American indie film. I had the privi- Mike XXL (2015) provoked something ROGER KOZA
lege of attending the premiere of Moon- more joyous with their reprogramming of Critic and programmer, Viennale, Hamburg
light at the 2016 Telluride Film Festival cinematic spectacle around (heterosexual) Film Festival, and Doc Buenos Aires
with a group of other film students and women’s scopophilia. Top 10 Films (ranked)
In this decade of particularities and Vitalina Varela, Stray Dogs, Hard to Be a
specificities, is there anything that is uni- God, Mysteries of Lisbon, Story of My Death,
THE 25 BEST versal about cinema? Perhaps only fears of The Image Book, Zama, Homeland: Iraq Year
NEW DIRECTORS its death. In metaphorical terms, cinema Zero, Tabu, Cemetery of Splendor
1. Mati Diop has been dying since before I was born. 6JG/QUV5KIPKƂECPV(KNO(GUVKXCN
2. Jordan Peele In literal terms, cinema has always been Locarno (Switzerland)
3. Alice Rohrwacher combustible, degradable, scratchable; now, The Most Creative Film Festival
4. Bi Gan it’s deletable and unsearchable. Films that Transcinema (Peru)
5. Ryan Coogler contend with this ultimate contingency
6. Roberto Minervini strike me as the most urgent: Garrett VIOLET LUCCA
7. Greta Gerwig Bradley’s 27-minute America devotes Web Editor, Harper’s Magazine
8. Nadav Lapid itself to recreating lost histories of Black Top 10 Films (ranked)
9. Eduardo Williams cinema; Thomas Heise’s nearly four-hour Cemetery of Splendor, No Home Movie,
10. Kantemir Balagov Heimat Is a Space in Time uses archival Zama, Experimenter, Timbuktu, Burning,
11. Jennifer Kent objects to recover the fast-fading lessons Midnight Traveler, Stray Dogs, Portrait of a
12. Hu Bo of Germany’s past. But now, as the always Lady on Fire, Holy Motors
13. Robert Eggers imminent end of cinema seems to pale Best Episodes of Twin Peaks: The Return
14. RaMell Ross in comparison to the assured end of our Part 18, Part 8, Part 17, Part 16, Part 1, Part 6,
15. Dee Rees planet, the images that I cling to are not Part 2, Part 15, Part 11, Part 2
16. László Nemes self-reflexive, but elemental: the serene,
17. Khalik Allah nurturing woods of Valérie Massadian’s GUY MADDIN
18. Ari Aster Nana (2011); the roiling seas of Helena Director, The Green Fog
19. Damien Chazelle Wittman’s Drift (2017); the arid, cracked Top 10 Films (ranked)
20. Joshua Oppenheimer farmland of Nila Madhab Panda’s Dark The Other Side of the Wind, The Wander-
21. Boots Riley Wind (2017) and the cyclone-wrecked ing Soap Opera, Mission: Impossible—
22. Eliza Hittman coastal villages seen on TVs within the film. Fallout, Horse Money, Mission: Impos-
23. Jodie Mack Like the best of movies, these films point us sible—Ghost Protocol, The Love Witch,
24. Ted Fendt to the richness—now under siege—of the Tangerine, +PƂPKVG(QQVDCNN, Cemetery of
25. Oliver Laxe worlds outside of the screen. z Splendor, Computer Chess

January-February 2020 | F ILM COMM ENT | 4 5

 S PECI AL SE CT ION FI LMS OF THE DECA DE
PERSONAL VIEWS continued
OLAF MÖLLER
Critic (Germany)
Top 26 Films (unranked)
Attack on Democracy: An Intervention,
Attenberg, Balikbayan #1: Memories of
Overdevelopment Redux III, Beloved Sisters,
Brownian Movement, The Chrysanthemum
and the Guillotine, Communism and the Net
or the End of Representative Democracy,
A Dangerous Method, Differently, Molus-
sia, The Ditch, The Duke of Burgundy, For
Example, The Philippines: Vapor Trail/For
Example, The Philippines: Wake, Garten,
The Golden Era, Heaven’s Story, A Hidden
Life, Holy Beasts, The Killing of a Sacred
Deer, The Last of the Unjust, A Lullaby to
the Sorrowful Mystery, The Missing Picture,
Nagasaki: Memories of My Son, The Strange
Color of Your Body’s Tears, The Tale of the
Princess Kaguya, Women of Malolos, The
Young Karl Marx
Best New Filmmakers (unranked)
Brady Corbet, Denis Do, Nicolás Rincón
Gille, Andreas Goldstein, Dag Johan
Haugerud, Huang Ya-li, Vahid Jalilvand, Jung
Yoon-suk, Hana Jusic, Aharon Keshales &
Navot Papushado, Joseph Kosinski, Klim
Kozinskij, Thiagarajan Kumararaja, Lem-
ohang Jeremiah Mosese, Anna Odell, Davis
Simanis, Gurvinder Singh, Bruno Sukrow,
Jordan Vogt-Roberts, Katharina Wyss
WESLEY MORRIS
Critic-at-Large, The New York Times
Top 10 Films (unranked)
The Interrupters, Lady Bird, Mad Max: Fury
Road, Magic Mike XXL, Margaret, The Mas-
ter, Moonlight, Norte, the End of History,
OJ: Made in America, ROMA
MEKADO MURPHY
Senior Staff Editor, The New York Times
Top 10 Films (ranked)
ROMA, The Master, Melancholia, Get Out,
Parasite, The Tribe, The Lobster, It Follows,
Whiplash, Moonlight
Best Shot of the Decade
The single-shot car sequence from Widows
SHEILA O’MALLEY
Critic, RogerEbert.com; columnist, Film
Comment
Top 10 Films (ranked)
Inherent Vice, Melancholia, %GTVKƂGF%QR[,
This Is Not a Film, The Wolf of Wall Street,
The Tree of Life, Moonlight, A Separation,
Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood, Get Out
Best New Filmmakers (ranked)
4 6 | F I L M C OM M EN T | January-February 2020
WHERE THE ACTION WAS
IN AN AGE DECRIED FOR BOTH
CGI AND FESTIVAL PANDERING,
R. EMMET SWEENEY PRESENTS
THE BEST IN FIGHT SCENES
2010
ROBOT
Androids Assemble
Proof that South Indian cinema could
compete on the same level as Bollywood,
this mind-bending sci-fi spectacular direct-
ed by S. Shankar, with stunt choreography
by Yuen Woo-ping, is a robot-gone-bad
Tamil blockbuster starring ageless Superstar
Rajinikanth and Aishwarya Rai Bacchan.
The centerpiece is a cops-vs.-evil-robot
battle in which the android, now replicated
into hundreds of clones, arranges himself
into different murderous shapes, including
a ball of guns, a bullet-spitting snake, a
drill, and its final form: a skyscraper-sized
giant who flips off the scientist who created
him. It is a sequence of joyful, surreally
mischievous destruction.
2011
FAST FIVE
Vault Heist
After Fast & Furious, director Justin
Lin decided to ease back on CGI and
put the emphasis on more practical car
stunts. Wily veteran choreographer Jack
Gill obliged with the most memorable
sequence in the franchise, a daredevil heist
in which Vin Diesel and Paul Walker drag
a bank vault out of a building and onto
the highway with a length of cable con-
nected to their souped-up Dodge Char-
gers. The vault model they used weighed
10,000 pounds, and the stunt drivers make
it swing into the cars of the corrupt cops
in pursuit with jaw-dropping precision.
2012
THE RAID: REDEMPTION
Hallway Machete Fight
The most influential action film of the
decade is a relentlessly bloody low-bud-
get fight film from Indonesia, directed by
Welsh filmmaker Gareth Evans. It intro-
duced Iko Uwais as both star and fight
choreographer, along with the Silat style of
martial arts (which necessitates close range
to utilize the sharp edges of knees and
elbows). Its structure of one never-ending
fight was a model for John Wick, Timo
THE RAID: REDEMPTION: PT MERANTAU/KOBAL/SHUTTERSTOCK
Tjahjanto’s The Night Comes for Us, and
endless knockoffs like Jimmy Henderson’s
Jailbreak. It’s hard to pick just one fight out
of the endless flow, but I’ll go with the ma-
chete fight in a hallway, in which Iko is out-
numbered four to one, and out-macheted
by the same ratio. After an establishing shot
of the bleak setup, Iko swiftly closes the gap
and delivers a blisteringly fast array of high
knees and elbows to various faces, ending
with an exclamation point as he slams the
final opponent’s head into the ground like
he is cracking a coconut.
2013
DRUG WAR
Final Shootout

MAD MAX: FURY ROAD: VILLAGE ROADSHOW/SHUTTERSTOCK; JOHN WICK: DAVID LEE/THUNDER ROAD/LIONSGATE/MJW/SUMMIT/SHUTTERSTOCK; THE FINAL MASTER: © UNITED ENTERTAINMENT/EVERETT COLLECTION
Drug War is an exacting and pitiless
mapping of cops, informants, and drug
dealers, all triangulating to a deadly fate. It
is another of Johnnie To’s rigorously com-
posed gangster films, but the first made
with Mainland money. This one feels
more mechanical than the Election dyad
or Exiled, as if the characters are playing
out predetermined fates. Timmy (Louis
Koo) is the snitch, who forces a collision
between the undercover cops who are
controlling him and the drug gangs he has
been attempting to infiltrate. To orches-
trates the final shootout in near silence,
punctuated by short staccato bursts of
bullets as Timmy tries to orient the cops
and gangs against each other in a mutually
assured destruction of crossfire. But the
geometry fails Timmy as well, who ends
up handcuffed to his own deadly design.
2014
JOHN WICK
Red Circle Club
For Hollywood, action films the 2010s
were defined by the ascendance of 87eleven
Action Design. It was founded by ex-stunt-
men Chad Stahelski and David Leitch,
whose innovation was creating a one-stop
shop, selling complete action sequences to
films still in preproduction, providing the
choreography, the stunt performers, and the
second unit direction. (They would even
train your star.) Stalhelski and Leitch, of
course, went on to start the ongoing John
Wick franchise, which was heavily influenced
by Hong Kong choreographer Yuen Woo-
ping, whom they saw at work on The Matrix
as members of the stunt team. The standout
sequence in the first John Wick is the Red
Circle nightclub shootout, an homage to
Jean-Pierre Melville’s Le cercle rouge. Keanu
Reeves is a model-like figure, recalling Alain
Delon in the Melville film, who cuts through
the Russian mob hangout with frictionless
“gun-fu” and Brazilian jiujitsu takedowns.
The muzzle flashes of the gunfight nearly
match the rhythm of the flickering disco-
ball lighting, and when Reeves emerges onto
the nightclub floor, with undulating patterns
projected behind him as throbbing EDM
fills the soundtrack, it momentarily embrac-
es its destiny as a musical.
2015
MAD MAX: FURY ROAD
Final Chase Back to the Citadel
Like The Raid, this is one long action
sequence, though a chase film rather
than a fight, a rolling revue of malformed
steampunk freaks, pole-jumping maniacs,
and one demented power chord–playing
mascot, all driving armored muscle cars
and trying to take down a one-armed
Charlize Theron and a mute Tom Hardy.
An overwhelming work orchestrated by
George Miller and his longtime stunt chore-
ographer Guy Norris, the film is a testament
to the remarkable stunt performers who
labored for five months to bring their vision
to the screen. It all comes together with
overwhelming force in the final chase, a
gonzo act of action filmmaking in which
there are spectacular car crashes, bloom-
ing explosions, obscenely risky stunts
(especially on those bendy poles that dip
into moving vehicles), and hand-to-hand
combat atop speeding wrecks that is pure
piston-pumping poetry.
2016
THE FINAL MASTER
Series of Duels
January-February 2020 | F ILM CO M M ENT | 47
RaMell Ross, Dee Rees, Josephine Decker,
Sophia Takal, Chloé Zhao, Jordan Peele,
Haifaa Al-Mansour, Ryan Coogler, Ava Du-
Vernay, Eva Vives
Film of the Decade
Inherent Vice, a loopy paranoid masterpiece
Film Person of the Decade
Jafar Panahi: It is not enough to be “in-
spired” by his example. It’s much better to
be furious on his behalf. As Rebecca West
once wrote, “a strong hatred is the best
lamp to bear in our hands as we go over the
dark places of life, cutting away the dead
things men tell us to revere.”
RICHARD PEÑA
Professor, Columbia University
Films of the Decade (unranked)
Cemetery of Splendor, An Elephant Sitting
Still, Ida, The Image Book, In the Last Days of
the City, Leviathan (Paravel & Castaing-Tay-
lor), Loveless, Marriage Story, Melancho-
lia, Monrovia, Indiana, My Golden Days,
Mysteries of Lisbon, Neighboring Sounds,
Once Upon a Time in Anatolia, An Over-
UKORNKƂECVKQPQH*GT$GCWV[, Pain and Glory,
Penance, Phantom Thread, Pina, The Rider,
Silent Souls, The Social Network, Stranger by
the Lake, Toni Erdmann, A Touch of Sin, We
Are What We Are, Zama
Best New Filmmakers (ranked)
Hu Bo, Chloé Zhao, Britni West, Pietro
Marcello, Jazmin Lopez, Jordan Peele,
Mikhaël Hers, Carlo Mirabella-Davis, Daouda
Coulibaly, Alice Rohrwacher
Film of the Decade
In the Last Days of the City
Film Person of the Decade
0GVƃKZCYQTFVJCVUKOWNVCPGQWUN[CTQWUGU
hope, despair, love, and hatred for cinema.
DANIELA PERSICO
Selection committee, Locarno Film Festival
Top 10 Films (ranked)
Holy Motors, The Tree of Life, Uncle Boon-
mee Who Can Recall His Past Lives, The
Turin Horse, No Home Movie, Vitalina Varela,
’Til Madness Do Us Part, Leviathan (Paravel
& Castaing-Taylor), Liberté, Arabian Nights
Film Persons of the Decade
Lav Diaz and David Lynch, because they
found an antidote to cinema being “tele-
XKUGFqVJGƂTUVD[IKXKPICPGYOGCPKPIVQ
ƂNOKEPCTTCVKXGVJGUGEQPFD[KORNQFKPIVJG
idea of the TV series.
Top 10 Italian Films of the Decade (ranked)
The King, Le quattro volte, Happy as
Lazzaro, Spira Mirabilis, Martin Eden, El Si-
cario, Room 164, Happy Times Will Come
Soon, The Other Side, Fire at Sea, The
Young Observant
 S PECI AL SE CT ION FI LMS OF THE DECA DE
PERSONAL VIEWS continued
SIERRA PETTENGILL
Filmmaker; critic
Top 6 Films (ranked)
The Act of Killing, Holy Motors, %GTVKƂGF
Copy, No Home Movie, A Touch of Sin, Un-
cle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives
Best New Filmmakers (ranked)
Roberto Minervini, Anna Rose Holmer,
Joshua Oppenheimer
MATÍAS PIÑEIRO
Director, The Princess of France; Assistant
Professor, Pratt Institute
Top 10 Films (ranked)
Happy Hour, Atlantics, Flowers, The Day
After, Travel Plans, La Flor, Sipo’hi—El lugar
del manduré, The Human Surge, Film social-
isme, Las facultades
Best New Filmmakers (ranked)
Ted Fendt, Eloisa Solaas, Mati Diop, Eduar-
do Williams, Riccardo Palladino, Sebastián
Lingiardi, Natalia Marin, Benjamin Crotty,
Ryûsuke Hamaguchi, Jorge Jácome
JAMES QUANDT
Senior Programmer, TIFF Cinematheque
Top 10 Films (ranked)
Zama, Goodbye to Language, Norte, the
End of History, Film socialisme, Vitalena Va-
rela/Horse Money, Amour fou, Sieranevada,
The Death of Louis XIV, The Strange Case of
Angelica, Mysteries of Lisbon
Best Restorations of the Decade (ranked)
From the Branches Drops the Withered Blos-
som (1960), Nana (1926), Bandits of Orgoso-
lo (1961), Diamonds of the Night (1964), My
Friend Ivan Lapshin (1985), L’Atalante (1934),
Khandhar/The Ruins (1984), Insiang (1976),
Francisca (1981), The House Is Black (1963)
NICOLAS RAPOLD
Editor-in-Chief, Film Comment
Top 25ish Films (unranked)
The Act of Killing, Aquarius, Archipelago,
The Assassin, The Ballad of Buster Scruggs,
Boyhood, Cameraperson, Clouds of Sils
Maria, Field Niggas, Goodbye to Language,
Hong Sangsoo: Complete Works (2010-
2019), The Kindergarten Teacher, Let the Fire
Burn, Let the Sunshine In, Leviathan (Paravel
& Castaing-Taylor), Lincoln, The Master,
Moonlight, mother!, National Gallery, No
Home Movie, The Social Network, Toni Erd-
mann, Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His
Past Lives, The Wolf of Wall Street, Zama
BOOTS RILEY
Director, Sorry to Bother You
4 8 | F ILM CO M MEN T | January-February 2020
Chinese director Xu Haofeng is also a
martial-arts historian, and his films reflect
his studies. He believes that “a real kung fu
battle lasts only seconds. And the results of
a competition between top practitioners
are decided even before opponents begin
combat.” The Final Master is another of
his intensely ritualized takes on the genre,
and it ends with a hypnotic succession
of duels as Liao Fan, who trained for two
months before shooting, consecutively
defeats the masters from 19 schools of
kung fu in Tianjin. Fighters are doomed
by their choice of weapon, stance, or target
before the bouts have even begun, giving
these fights an abstracted quality, as if they
had already taken place and these are re-
enactments—or, perhaps more accurately,
how-to manuals. Liao Fan often pauses
at the end of each encounter, holding the
winning thrust in place for examination
by willing students.
2017
BAAHUBALI 2: THE CONCLUSION
Pindari Attack on Kuntal Desh
The biggest Indian movie of 2017 was this
mythological action melodrama directed by
S.S. Rajamouli and starring the dashingly
shirtless Prabhas. A complex tale of a war-
ring royal family and the titular Baahubali’s
(and his son’s) thwarted path to the throne,
its action scenes have an inventive pulp
sensibility that recently went viral on Twitter
(people love soldiers getting slingshotted
onto a castle). I found the most joy in the
Pindari attack on Kuntal Desh, when the
junior Baahubali first encounters his great
love, Princess Devasena (Anushka Shetty).
Their meet-cute occurs as they turn a bloody
archery fight against Pindari warriors into
a giddy dance, spinning each other around
into position to kill dozens of unlucky sol-
diers. It’s love at first archery-bow sight.
2018
MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE—FALLOUT
Bathroom Fight
The Mission: Impossible franchise has
become a reliable source of insane Tom
Cruise stunts for years now, and Fallout
is no slouch with its 25,000-foot HALO
jump out of a jet. But my favorite of the
Wade Eastwood–designed setpieces is
the bathroom fight between Tom Cruise,
Henry Cavill, and Liang Yang (an expres-
sively intense stuntman getting his first
extended acting job here), which is brutal
and funny, and effortlessly conveys the
personality of the characters. Cruise is
mostly out of breath and a step behind,
buying time to think his way out of it, while
Cavill is a meathead monster who smashes
Yang through a mirror and raises his fists
as if he were in a Golden Gloves bout and
not a black ops mission. Yang is the superior
fighter to them both, and his face exhibits
an intimidating sense of calm that will be
pierced only when an unexpected fourth
person enters the fray, rearranging the power
dynamics for the last time in the fight.
2019
AVENGEMENT
Pub Brawl
AVENGEMENT: PHOTO COURTESY OF SAMUEL GOLDWYN FILMS
The latest collaboration between DTV kings
Scott Adkins and director Jesse V. Johnson
(their fifth in two years) is a bare-knuckle
brawler of a film. Adkins plays a small-time
London crook hardened by his time in the
pen; someone put a price on his head, so he
is constantly getting into ugly, tooth-shatter-
ing fights. The film tracks his revenge against
the gang who sent him to jail, holding them
hostage in a grimy pub until his brother
(Craig Fairbrass) shows up—and then all
hell breaks loose. Adkins and fight coordi-
nator Dan Styles opt for sloppy, inebriated
violence, finding creative blood-spurting
uses for two-by-fours, crowbars, and conve-
niently placed pickled-egg jars. z
Top 10 Films (ranked)
Boy, Holy Motors, Get Out, ROMA, The
Master, Black Swan, First Reformed, The
Hateful Eight, Diamantino, Mood Indigo
KIVA REARDON
Lead Programmer, Contemporary World
Cinema, Toronto International Film Festival
Top 10 Films (ranked)
Attenberg, Faces Places, Moonlight, Mad
Max: Fury Road, Zero Dark Thirty, Félicité,
Portrait of a Lady on Fire, I, Daniel Blake,
Creed, A Touch of Sin
Best New Filmmakers (unranked)
,GPPC$CUU5QƂC$QJFCPQYKE\/CVK&KQR
Hassen Ferhani, Eliza Hittman, Rubaiyat
Hossain, Hajooj Kuka, Narimane Mari, Karim
Sayad, Jahmil X.T. Qubeka
Best Sports Movies (ranked)
The Second Game, Creed, I, Tonya, Freedom
Fields, Minding the Gap, Moneyball, High
Flying Bird, Boxing Gym, Goon, Skate Kitchen
KONG RITHDEE
&GRWV[&KTGEVQT6JCK(KNO#TEJKXGƂNOETKVKE
The Bangkok Post
Top 16 Films (ranked)
Goodbye to Language, Uncle Boonmee
Who Can Recall His Past Lives, Zama, Right
Now, Wrong Then, Cameraperson, The As-
sassin, The Social Network, A Touch of Sin,
Poetry, Post Tenebras Lux, The Turin Horse,
Tabu, Cemetery of Splendor, Personal Shop-
per, Jauja, Phantom Thread
Best New Filmmakers (ranked)
Ari Aster, Lucien Castaing-Taylor & Véréna
Paravel, Phutthipong Aroonpheng, Bi Gan,
Katsuya Tomita, Yann Gonzalez, Davy Chou,
Sompot Chidgasornpongse, Nontawat
Numbenchapol, Yeon Sang-ho, Yosep Anggi
Noen, Kavich Neang, Midi Z, Jewel Maranan,
Valérie Massadian, Ashim Ahluwalia, Nawapol
Thamrongrattanarit, Nattawut Poonpiriya,
Anthony Chen, Jakrawal Nilthamrong
Film Person of the Decade
Jean-Luc Godard
JOÃO PEDRO RODRIGUES
Director, The Ornithologist
Top Films of the Decade (ranked)
Attenberg, The Strange Case of Angelica, Po-
liceman, Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His
Past Lives, Meek’s Cutoff, House of Tolerance,
The Ballad of Genesis and Lady Jaye, Holy
Motors, Neighboring Sounds, Tabu, Walker,
Stranger by the Lake, The Immigrant, Only
Lovers Left Alive, Under the Skin, Horse Mon-
ey, Maps to the Stars, The Hateful Eight, Raw,
Midnight Special, The Death of Louis XIV,
On the Beach at Night Alone, Body Electric,
Amazing Grace, Knife + Heart, Ash Is Purest
White, La Flor, Transit, Pain and Glory T H E C O M M E N TA R Y
Best New Filmmakers (unranked)
Frank Beauvais, Marcelo Caetano, Lucien CONTINUES
Castaing-Taylor & Véréna Paravel, Carlos E AC H W E E K O N
Conceição, Yann Gonzalez, Daniel Hui, Dane
Komljen, Nadav Lapid, Marie Losier, Damien
Manivel, Kleber Mendonça Filho, Gastón
Solnicki, Soon-Mi Yoo
Film of the Decade
THE
Twin Peaks: The Return
JONATHAN ROMNEY
FILM
Contributing Editor, Film Comment
Top 10 Films (ranked)
COMMENT
Son of Saul, Upstream Color, The Act of
Killing, The Tribe, The Great Beauty, Target PODCAST
(Alexander Zeldovich), The Turin Horse, The
Arbor, Le quattro volte, Toni Erdmann
Best New Filmmakers (unranked)
Lila Avilés, Kantemir Balagov, Clio Barnard, RECENT &
Bi Gan, Mati Diop, João Dumans & Affonso
Uchoa, Ava DuVernay, Nana Ekvtimish-
UPCOMING
vili & Simon Groß, Hu Bo, Jennifer Kent, EPISODES
Kogonada, László Nemes, Caroline Poggi
& Jonathan Vinel, Alice Rohrwacher, RaMell
Ross, Léonor Serraille, Myroslav Slabosh- The Decade Project:
pytsky, Virgil Vernier, Benh Zeitlin A Special Series
Film of the Decade on the 2010s
Son of Saul+VYCUQPGQHCJCPFHWNQHƂNOU
VJCVSWGUVKQPGFVJGDCUKECUUWORVKQPUQHƂNO
language (among them The Tribe, Zama, Un-
Scorsese and
der the Skin). Also vital was The Act of Killing, The Irishman
documentary conceived as provocation and
undercover activism, and one of the decade’s Best Films of
GUUGPVKCNƂNOUKPVGTOUQHUJGFFKPINKIJVQP 2019 Countdown
hitherto under-publicized horrors.
Person/Phenomenon of the Decade Marriage Story:
Marvel Studios. The Marvel Cinematic
Universe had a deadening effect on cinema.
Couples Edition
It played a huge part in Disney’s world-de-
vouring corporate project; it gobbled up the The Rep Report:
VKOGCPFKOCIKPCVKQPUQHƂNOOCMGTUYJQ Varda and Beyond
otherwise have pursued more individual
projects (among them Cate Shortland, Chloé
Zhao, and Anna Boden & Ryan Fleck); and it
changed mainstream cinephilia into an us-
and-them phenomenon, akin to sports fan-
dom: if you weren’t for the Team, you were
against it. Doctor Strange was fun, though.
RAJENDRA ROY
Chief Curator of Film, Museum of Modern Art
Top 10 Films (ranked)
Faces Places, Toni Erdmann, Black Panther,
Amour, Citizenfour, Parasite, Mommy, Pina,
Listen and subscribe
Call Me by Your Name, Mad Max: Fury Road on Soundcloud, iTunes,
Best New Filmmakers (ranked)
Jennifer Kent, Xavier Dolan, Lulu Wang,
Spotify, Google Play,
Damien Chazelle or Stitcher
Film of the Decade
As the decade, and all the systems we have
January-February 2020 | F I LM C O MME NT | 49
 S PECI AL SE CT ION FI LMS OF THE DECA DE
PERSONAL VIEWS continued
clung to, come(s) to an end, Parasite sums it up
with a perfectly calibrated symphony of chaos.
Film Person of the Decade
Kevin Feige (Oh come on, you know it’s true...)
JOSH & BENNY SAFDIE
Directors, Uncut Gems
Top 11 Films (ranked)
Phantom Thread, The Favourite, Margaret
(director’s cut), Under the Skin, The Wolf of
Wall Street, Inside Llewyn Davis, The Act of
Killing/The Look of Silence, Parasite, Behind
the Candelabra, Bitter Lake/I’m Still Here,
Hard to Be a God
SUKHDEV SANDHU
Director of the Colloquium for Unpopular
Culture at New York University
Top 10 Films (ranked)
Nostalgia for the Light, A Story of Chil-
dren and Film, The Clock, Toni Erdmann,
Paddington 2, Melancholia, Poetry, Faces
Places, Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His
Past Lives, Before Midnight
Best New Filmmakers (ranked)
Umar Riaz, Bi Gan, Matt Stephenson, Ian
Giles, Steve Sullivan, Joe Cornish, Andrea
Luka Zimmerman, Morgan Quaintance, Ari
Aster, Kieran Evans
Film Person of the Decade
Agnès Varda
Best Film Literature of the Decade
(unranked)
Re-Enter the Dragon: Genre Theory, Bruc-
esploitation and the Sleazy Joys of Lowbrow
Cinema by Stewart Home; Murderous Pas-
sions: The Delirious Cinema of Jesus Franco,
Vol. 1 by Stephen Thrower with Julian
Granger; The Liberated Film Club at Close-
Up Film Centre by Stanley Schtinter (ed.);
Werner Herzog—A Guide for the Perplexed:
Conversations with Paul Cronin; La Jetée by
Chris Darke; His Work Their Work Her Work
My Words by Eden & Andrew Kötting; Harun
Farocki Institut (all the publications)
EVA SANGIORGI
Director, Viennale
Top 10 Films (ranked)
Stranger by the Lake, Tabu, Burning, Only
Lovers Left Alive, Happy as Lazzaro, Martin
Eden, Toni Erdmann, I Was at Home, But…,
Zama, Kaili Blues
Best New Filmmakers (ranked)
Eduardo Williams, Kleber Mendonça Filho,
Bi Gan, Peter Strickland, Pietro Marcello,
Alice Rohrwacher, Mati Diop, Nadav Lapid,
Bas Devos, Maria Alché, Tatiana Huezo, Ying
Liang, Ala Eddine Slim, Luise Donschen,
5 0 | F IL M C O MME NT | January-February 2020
Penny Lane, Gabriel Abrantes, Eloy Enciso,
Virgil Vernier, Ezequiel Yanco
Film of the Decade
Stranger by the Lake: CƂNOYKVJOCP[
dimensions, within the simplicity of a story of
desire and genre. I am left speechless and
completely seduced.
Film Persons of the Decade
Kristen Stewart and Gilberto Perez
PAUL SCHRADER
Director, First Reformed
Top 10 Films (ranked)
First Reformed, Clouds of Sils Maria, The Stu-
dent, Ida, The Irishman, Boyhood, Burning,
Pain and Glory, The Tree of Life, Leviathan
(Andrey Zvyagintsev)
MICHAEL SRAGOW
Contributing Editor, Film Comment
Top 10 Films (unranked)
The Social Network, Foxtrot, Vincere,
Spotlight, Ida, A Separation, Timbuktu,
The Missing Picture, The Sisters Brothers,
Paddington 2
Film of the Decade
The Social Network
Best Non-Series Animation (unranked)
Big Fish & Begonia, Big Hero 6, Ernest and
Celestine, Inside Out, In This Corner of the
World, My Life as a Zucchini, The Wind
Rises, Zootopia
Top Franchise Highs (unranked)
Black Panther, Cinderella, Captain America:
Civil War, Dawn of the Planet of the Apes/
War of the Planet of the Apes, Deadpool 2,
Downton Abbey, Finding Dory, Furious 7,
Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows (Parts 1
& 2), The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug/
The Battle of the Five Armies
ABBY SUN
Programmer and critic
Top 10 Films (ranked)
Mad Max: Fury Road, Leviathan (Paravel
& Castaing-Taylor), Asako I & II, The Task,
Meek’s Cutoff, Stranger in Paradise, Flight
of a Bullet, Support the Girls, Li’l Quinquin,
Holy Motors
Best New Filmmakers (unranked)
Basma Alsharif, Beata Bubenets, Jose-
phine Decker, Mati Diop, Jodie Mack, Ter-
ence Nance, Véréna Paravel, RaMell Ross,
Dominga Sotomayor, Stephanie Spray
SANDI TAN
Director, Shirkers
Best New Filmmakers (ranked)
Ari Aster, Panos Cosmatos, Damien Cha-
zelle, Anthony Chen, Kleber Mendonça
Filho, Greta Gerwig, Bart Layton, Bing Liu,
Luke Lorentzen, Lorene Scafaria
AMY TAUBIN
Contributing Editor, Film Comment and
Artforum
Top 20 Films (ranked)
Spoor, The Clock, No Home Movie, Goodbye
to Language, The Sky Socialist: Environs and
Out-Takes, Parasite, A Dangerous Method,
Zodiac, Che, The Irishman, Moonlight, I Am
Not Your Negro, A Touch of Sin, Only Lovers
Left Alive, Wild Grass, Boyhood, Honeyland,
The Assassin, Get Out, Toni Erdmann
Best New Filmmakers (ranked)
Jordan Peele, Greta Gerwig, Damien
Chazelle, Kantemir Balagov, Boots Riley,
Ava DuVernay, Benh Zeitlin, Nanfu Wang,
Asif Kapadia, Antonio Méndez Esparza,
Alice Rohrwacher, Ezra Edelman, Tim
Sutton, Charles Ferguson, Keith Miller, Sam
Fleischner, Jonathan Olshefski, Tatiana
Huezo, Dee Rees, Laura Bispuri
GINA TELAROLI
Filmmaker; critic; video archivist, Martin
Scorsese’s Sikelia Productions
Top 10 Films (ranked)
Peterloo, Elle, Eniaios Cycles 6,7,8, Unstop-
pable, Mysteries of Lisbon, No Home Movie,
Leave No Trace, Differently, Molussia, Ceme-
tery of Splendor, Edge of Tomorrow
Best New Filmmakers (ranked)
Ted Fendt, Khalik Allah, Joanna Arnow,
Bradley Cooper, Erin Espelie, Silvia das
Fadas, Nuotama Bodomo
WANG MUYAN
Critic, The Paper
Top 10 Films (ranked)
Burning, Like Someone in Love, Holy
Motors, The Lost City of Z, Goodbye First
Love, Mektoub, My Love: Canto Uno &
Intermezzo, An Elephant Sitting Still, ’Til
Madness Do Us Part, The Day He Arrives,
The Strange Case of Angelica
KRISTEN WARNER
Associate Professor, University of Alabama
Top 10 Films (ranked)
Magic Mike XXL, The Wolf of Wall Street, 12
Years a Slave, Spring Breakers, The Paper-
boy, Moonlight, Tangerine, The Beach Bum,
Widows, Phantom Thread
K.F. WATANABE
Deputy Director, Film, Japan Society
Top 10 Films (unranked)
%GTVKƂGF%QR[, Downsizing, Happy as
Lazzaro, Happy Hour, Hill of Freedom,
Meek’s Cutoff, Nocturama, Shin Godzilla,
Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past
Lives, Western of Joan of Arc); Joaquin Phoenix (The GENEVIEVE YUE
Top 10 Japanese Films (ranked) Master); Cynthia Nixon (A Quiet Passion); Assistant Professor, The New School
Shin Godzilla, Happy Hour, A Bride for Pilar Gamboa, Laura Paredes, Valeria Top 10 Films (ranked)
Rip Van Winkle, The Tale of the Princess Correa, and Elisa Carricajo (La Flor); Jack No Home Movie, The Last of the Unjust,
Kaguya, Shoplifters, Fires on the Plain, Black (Bernie); Zhao Tao (Ash Is Purest Magic Mike XXL, Nostalgia for the Light,
Sennan Asbestos Disaster, 0.5mm, Before White); Harry Dean Stanton (Lucky); Kim Min- Cameraperson, OJ: Made in America, Two
We Vanish, Night Cruising hee (On the Beach at Night Alone); Days, One Night, Museum Hours, Right
Sarit Larry (The Kindergarten Teacher) Now, Wrong Then, In Jackson Heights z
C. MASON WELLS
Director of Theatrical Sales, Kino Lorber
Top 10 Films (unranked)
Cameraperson, Caterpillar, Dreileben:
Beats Being Dead, Elle, The Extravagant
Shadows, Goodbye First Love, Hissein
Habré: A Chadian Tragedy, Jackass 3D,
Margaret, The Rehearsal
Best New Filmmakers (ranked)
James N. Kienitz Wilkins, Lev Kalman &
Whitney Horn, Nadav Lapid, Eliza Hittman,
Nathan Silver, Ted Fendt, John Magary,
Drew Tobia, Kazik Radwanski
Film of the Decade
You Ain’t Seen Nothin’ Yet: a bittersweet
ending of one era and a thrilling new
beginning of another.
Film Thing of the Decade
Screen Slate

MANU YAÑEZ MURILLO

Critic, Otros Cines Europa
Top 10 Films (ranked)
Zama, The Assassin, No Home Movie, A
Quiet Passion, Vitalina Varela, Cemetery
of Splendor, Goodbye to Language, What
Now? Remind Me, Sieranevada, Phantom
Thread
Best New Filmmakers (ranked)
Alice Rohrwacher, Joel Potrykus, Nadav
Lapid, Eduardo Williams, Ognjen Glavonic,
Roberto Minervini, Jordan Peele, Milagros
Mumenthaler, Rick Alverson, David Robert
Mitchell, Virgil Vernier, Bi Gan, Greta Ger-
wig, Oliver Laxe, Jennifer Kent
Film of the Decade
Holy Motors:. After watching it several
VKOGUtVYKEGKPVJG%CPPGU(KNO
HGUVKXCNt+ECPoVUC[+WPFGTUVCPFCVJKPI
about this movie. But when I delve into its
fragmentary structure, its magnetic imag-
es, and its joyride of sounds and songs, I’m
left in a revelatory state of mind: dazed,
as when I try to comprehend the current
state of audiovisual culture; melancholic,
as when I look at the world around us; and
deeply moved, as in my daily interactions
with my children.
Film Person of the Decade
David Lynch
Best Performances (ranked) AVAILABLE DIGITALLY ON DEMAND AND ON DVD AND BLURAY
Robin Wright (The Congress); Lise Leplat www.filmrise.com

Prudhomme (Jeannette: The Childhood

January-February 2020 | F I LM CO MME NT | 51

 SPECIAL SECTION

BEST FILMS OF 2019

Director Bong Joon Ho captures his first #1 spot with the thoroughly ingenious
Parasite—also a first for an Asian entry. The list includes an array of often intensely
personal movies: big (Once Upon a Time... in Hollywood, The Irishman), “small” (An
Elephant Sitting Still), and differently big (La Flor)—plus a distinct sleeper or two
(Transit) for the ages. The poll, conducted among the magazine’s contributors and
staff, is divided into 1) films that received U.S. theatrical runs and 2) those viewed
in 2019 with no announced plans for U.S. theatrical distribution. For each ballot, a
first-place choice was allotted 20 points, 19 for second, and so on.

1 2

20 BEST FILMS OF 2019* 20 BEST FILMS WITHOUT U.S. DISTRIBUTION

1. Parasite Bong Joon Ho, South Korea (1)
2. The Irishman Martin Scorsese, USA
3. Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood Quentin Tarantino,
USA/UK/China
4. Transit Christian Petzold, Germany/France
5. Atlantics Mati Diop, France/Senegal/Belgium
6. The Souvenir Joanna Hogg, UK/USA
7. High Life Claire Denis, Germany/France/USA/UK/Poland
8. Ash Is Purest White Jia Zhangke, China
9. Pain and Glory Pedro Almodóvar, Spain
10. Uncut Gems Josh & Benny Safdie, USA
11. Marriage Story Noah Baumbach, USA
12. La Flor Mariano Llinás, Argentina
13. An Elephant Sitting Still Hu Bo, China
14. Long Day’s Journey Into Night Bi Gan, China/France
15. Synonyms Nadav Lapid, France/Israel/Germany
16. Asako I & II Ryûsuke Hamaguchi, Japan/France
17. Us Jordan Peele, USA
18. The Image Book Jean-Luc Godard, Switzerland
19. Portrait of a Lady on Fire Céline Sciamma, France
20. Ad Astra James Gray, USA
*Released theatrically in the U.S.
1. State Funeral Sergei Loznitsa, Netherlands/Lithuania (2)
2. Endless Night Eloy Enciso Cachafeiro, Spain
3. To the Ends of the Earth Kiyoshi Kurosawa, Japan
4. MS Slavic 75QƂC$QJFCPQYKE\&GTCIJ%CORDGNN%CPCFC
5. Present.Perfect. Shengze Zhu, USA/Hong Kong
6. Oh Mercy! Arnaud Desplechin, France
7. Tommaso Abel Ferrara, Italy
8. Bait Mark Jenkin, UK
9. Belonging Burak Çevik, Turkey/Canada/France
10. Midnight in Paris James Blagden, Roni Moore, USA
11. No Data Plan Miko Revereza, USA
12. It Must Be Heaven Elia Suleiman, France/Qatar/Germany/
Canada/Turkey/Palestine
13. Wasp Network Olivier Assayas, France/Spain/Brazil
14. So Pretty Jessie Jeffrey Dunn Rovinelli, USA/France
15. Just 6.5 Saeed Roustayi, Iran
16. Bird Island Sergio da Costa & Maya Kosa, Switzerland
17. 9JCV9G.GHV7PƂPKUJGF Mariam Ghani, Afghanistan/
Qatar/USA
18. You Will Die at 20 Amjad Abu Alala, Sudan/France/
Egypt/Germany/Norway/Qatar
19. Lina from Lima María Paz González, Chile/Argentina/Peru
20. Devil Between the Legs Arturo Ripstein, Mexico

5 2 | F IL M C O MM EN T | January-February 2020
 EDITORS’ CHOICE
NICOLAS RAPOLD
Bacurau
First Cow
The Irishman
Little Women
Marriage Story (A)
Once Upon a Time... in Hollywood (B)
Parasite
Portrait of a Lady on Fire (C)
A B The Souvenir
Uncut Gems
New Old Pick: Hajka (1977)

CLINTON KRUTE
1. Uncut Gems (D)
2. First Cow
3. Bacurau
4. Marriage Story
5. High Life (E)
6. Rolling Thunder Revue: A Bob Dylan Story
7. The Souvenir (F)
C D 8. Atlantics
9. Peterloo
10. The Irishman

STEVEN MEARS
1. The Irishman (G)
2. Marriage Story
3. Parasite
4. Transit
5. Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood
6. The Souvenir
7. Ash Is Purest White
8. Ray & Liz
E F
9. The Image Book (H)
10. Knives Out

DEVIKA GIRISH
1. Transit
2. Atlantics
3. Bacurau
4. Uncut Gems
5. Synonyms
6. Little Women (J)
7. Martin Eden (I)
8. Ray & Liz
G H 9. High Life
10. America (Garrett Bradley)
New Old Pick: Reason, Debate, and a
Tale (1977)

READERS’ POLL
We want to hear what your favorite movies of
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January-February 2020 | F I LM COM MEN T | 5 3

 S PECI AL SE CT ION B EST FI LMS OF 201 9
Transit
MAKING THE CASE
WHAT FILMS ROSE TO THE TOP AND
WHY THEY SHOULD ENDURE
PARASITE
Bong Joon Ho’s film explodes any lin-
gering notion that great art must bear
some relation to subtlety, as well as any
presumption that unsubtle art is, by exten-
sion, uncomplicated. What might have
served as subtexts of Bong’s diabolical
class critique—the tenacity of patriarchy,
the imminence of climate cataclysm, the
baseless aura conferred on all things Amer-
ican—emerge very much as text. The fear-
some machine that is Parasite keeps rotat-
ing, flaunting different faces of its argument
and intricacies of its engineering, somehow
coaxing us toward frequent cheers or
laughs despite its devastating diagnosis: it
has so got all of our numbers. I’m wary
of the reflex to elevate immaculate form
over provocative mess, but coming off two
prior Bong features, Snowpiercer and Okja,
that uneasily balanced competing impulses
toward precision and chaos, momen-
tum and disarray, the shape and focus of
Parasite feel all the more remarkable. If
there’s something slightly pitiless about
the exercise—and the performances, espe-
cially by Jo Yeo-jeong and Song Kang-ho,
thankfully invite our compassion—well,
the emergencies Bong confronts, the emer-
gencies we all confront, don’t allow much
time for pity.—Nick Davis
THE IRISHMAN
“Crazy that the real life events in [Martin
Scorsese’s The Irishman & Rolling Thunder
Revue], happening at the same time, actually
occurred in the same country or even on the
same planet.” Filmmaker and archivist Gina
Telaroli’s tweet has rattled around in my
head as I watch and rewatch The Irishman, a
film that trades Rolling Thunder’s late-20th-
century utopian striving for a purgatorial
5 4 | F IL M C O MM ENT | January-February 2020
Ash Is Purest White
dirge through the same era. In Rolling Thun-
der Revue, Bob Dylan creates an ever expand-
ing world, moving beyond the real into the
fabulous. That type of generative expression,
or any type of expression, is in short supply
in The Irishman. Mafia soldier Frank Sheeran
moves through history in a dissociative
daze, watching reports of his own actions on
television like a passive observer. Words are
used to obscure, avoid, insinuate, and mis-
direct, Sheeran remains willfully, necessarily
unknowable to himself and his loved ones,
and his world steadily narrows until he’s all
alone with nothing but the view through a
cracked door.—Nellie Killian
ONCE UPON A TIME… IN
HOLLYWOOD
Quentin Tarantino’s latest film is tantaliz-
ingly out of step with the products of the
late-’60s dream factory to which it pays lov-
ing tribute: it’s long, it’s slow, very little actu-
ally happens during its luxuriant runtime,
and it barely introduces anything resembling
dramatic conflict until its second half. And
yet it seemed to dominate the cultural dis-
course—for 30 seconds anyway—just the
same as would any big-budget live-action
comic book adaptation or YA cash-grab or
what have you. Indeed, the film has been all
but talked into the ground: its astonishing
lead performances, the characteristically
naïve act of historical revisionism that brings
its narrative to a delirious close, Robert Rich-
ardson’s transporting cinematography, the
sheer scope and anal-compulsive richness of
Tarantino’s parallel-1969, and its sometimes
confounding politics. But I suspect we’ll still
be talking about it for some time to come; it’s
one of its maker’s banner achievements and,
moreover, it seems to belong to neither 1969
nor 2019—proof positive that, while films
Atlantics
are inevitably documents of their historical
moments, they can also superimpose one
time atop another such that the past speaks
forcefully and movingly of the present, and
vice versa.—Dan Sullivan
TRANSIT
Christian Petzold once again conjures
history as a particular alchemy of fate and
the cold logics of power. The filmmaker’s
fascination with the interventions of chance
finds its perfect muse in Anna Seghers’s
1944 novel about a refugee whose escape
from Nazi-occupied Paris to Marseille—
where he remains stranded in wait for a
transit visa to Mexico—is propelled by a
series of coincidences. Tasked with deliver-
ing the documents of a dead writer to his
wife, our protagonist begins, by accident,
to impersonate the writer, and falls in love
with the wife, who haunts the city’s cob-
blestoned streets in search of her husband.
Petzold turns the spectrality of this premise
into a critique of the repetitions of history:
mixing references to WWII-era Europe with
a modern mise en scène, he sets Transit in
a liminal, unsettlingly familiar present of
refugees in crisis. Even the film’s reckless
romanticism becomes a powerful evocation
of the condition of statelessness. Petzold
understands that in the sheer opacity of
bureaucratic limbo, in its maddening antic-
ipation and semiotic craziness, love—with
its promise of making you anew—can feel
like the ultimate sign.—Devika Girish
ATLANTICS
Mati Diop’s debut feature opens with an
exodus, but really it is a tale of home, of
those left behind, and inevitably of return.
Unlike its progenitor—Diop’s 2009 non-
fiction short, Atlantiques—the feature is
primarily a love story, as much between
Diop and Senegal as between its star-
crossed young protagonists: the increas-
ingly rebellious Ada (Mama Sané), stuck
in an arranged engagement to a wealthy
businessman, and handsome construction
worker Souleiman (Ibrahima Traoré). But

Pain and Glory
what begins as a seemingly straightforward
account of contemporary social dilem-
mas—refugee crises, economic imbalance,
workplace exploitation, and women’s
autonomy—takes a fascinating, rich dive
into the paranormal. The supernatural ele-
ments make a surprisingly effective frame-
work, one that communicates the horror
and tragedy of these (not unique) injustices
and reconciles the film’s righteous political
anger with a sense of possibility. With the
help of Claire Mathon’s cinematography
and Fatima Al Qadiri’s otherworldly score,
Diop has delivered an extraordinary, power-
fully complex picture.—Kelli Weston
THE SOUVENIR
Joanna Hogg’s fourth feature conjures a
pivotal period of her twenties in early ’80s
London—her first steps into her artistic
voice, and her overwhelming first love—
from sensory fragments and diaries in lieu
of a traditional screenplay. In her first lead
role, Honor Swinton Byrne keeps Hogg’s
surrogate, Julie, on the tipping edge of
self-determination: as she falls for opaque
foreign services agent Anthony (a magnetic
Tom Burke), Julie slips into a baroque
hyperreality, often seeming generations
removed from The Fall playing on her hi-fi,
and blinds herself to her lover’s track marks
and borrowed pound-notes. Her sheltered
naïveté can be disarming, but that irratio-
nality is the film’s engine: Hogg and Byrne
trust her to follow the uncertain paths
forged by the heart, where Julie claims a cre-
ative point of view that could only be hers.
As lucid on the British upper class as Hogg’s
austere prior features, yet as conceptual as
her art-school shorts—which introduced
her to a young Tilda Swinton, both Byrne’s
real-life mother and Julie’s on-screen one—
The Souvenir cuts deepest of all for its dis-
tilled evocation of, as Anthony terms it, the
mysteries of life “as it is experienced inside
of this soft machine.”—Chloe Lizotte
HIGH LIFE
When it comes to integrity of storytelling,
PERSONAL BESTS
OPAL H. BENNETT (POV, PBS)
Shorts:
All Inclusive
Black to Techno
Brotherhood
Green
Guaxuma
La Flor In the Absence
Kanari
Claire Denis is without parallel in con- Nightcrawlers
temporary cinema. If led down a narrative St. Louis Superman
and thematic path, she’s going to explore Stay Close
every contour, detour, implication, and
accrued responsibility along the way. For ANDREW CHAN (The Criterion Collection)
Denis, there is no other way. Which is why 1. Parasite
2. Asako I & II
in High Life, instances of rape and murder,
3. 3 Faces
and the introduction of something called
4. Too Late to Die Young
“the fuckbox”—a room where convicted
5. Atlantics
felons-cum-astronauts kinkily expend
6. Us
their pent-up desires while in outer-space 7. Black Mother
exile—bear not even the scent of provo- 8. A Faithful Man
cation. Following through on a premise in 9. Ash Is Purest White
which state and social rejects are cooped 10. Pain and Glory
up in a space station for perpetuity, their
bodies and fluids monitored and extracted ASHLEY CLARK (BAM)
by a dominatrix nurse, what might seem 1. Ray & Liz
outrageous is just logical, inevitable, and 2. The Souvenir
truly, if disturbingly, human. Much like 3. Transit
her harrowingly tactile, unblinkingly erotic 4. Atlantics
exploration of vampiric desire in Trouble 5. Babylon
Every Day, Denis’s unshakable foray into 6. One Child Nation
science fiction honors and exults in the 7. Uncut Gems
genre’s modalities without permitting any 8. América (Erick Stoll, Chase Whiteside)
escape from human nature or, especially 9. American Factory
and relatedly, the human body. When Rob- 10. Cold Case Hammarskjöld
ert Pattinson’s Monte is left drifting through
the cosmos with his daughter, whom he’s JORDAN CRONK (Acropolis Cinema)
raised from infancy (and who’s only ever 'ZRGTKOGPVCNƂNO
known his company), their fate is handled 2008 (Blake Williams), Austrian Pavilion
as a true dilemma, an inevitable outcome (Philipp Fleischmann), the eyes empty and
of who we are, how we’re built, and where the pupils burning with rage and desire (Luis
Macías), The Giverny Document (Ja’Tovia
we’re headed. Some look away from the
Gary), Kansas Atlas (Peggy Ahwesh), Red Film
abyss. Denis pursues it, magnetized and fas-
(Sara Cwynar), The Sky Socialist: Environs and
cinated.—Eric Hynes
Out-Takes (Ken Jacobs), Tourism Studies
(Joshua Gen Solondz), Transcript (Erica Sheu),
ASH IS PUREST WHITE Tyrant Star (Diane Severin Nguyen)
Jia Zhangke’s film should be seen as the
summation of the filmmaker’s prolonged MOLLY HASKELL
and up-to-the-minute depiction of his Charlie Says
nation’s errant journey throughout the The Irishman
21st century, marked by the twilight of Little Women
communism and the hasty implementa- Marriage Story
tion of capitalism. This social drifting is Midsommar
embodied in the film by the tumultuous Once Upon a Time... in Hollywood
story of Qiao and Bin—spanning from Pain and Glory
2001 to 2017, and starring Zhao Tao, Jia’s Parasite
longtime muse, and Liao Fan—whose Portrait of a Lady on Fire
Continued on page 57 Uncut Gems
January-February 2020 | F I LM C OM MEN T | 5 5
 S PECI AL SE CT ION B EST FI LMS OF 201 9
Asako I & II
HEART OF THE MATTER
THE DANGERS POSED BY INDUSTRY
FORCES OF CONSOLIDATION CAN’T
STOP US FROM FEELING THE LOVE
BY NICOLAS RAPOLD
R
ecently, i was talking about
the legacy of the 2010s with some
colleagues. We fell into an ebb
and flow as old as time, but more
sharply felt than ever: marveling at the
artistic peaks reached, lamenting the rise in
corporate conglomeration. (Full disclosure:
we were recording ourselves for The Film
Comment Podcast. Critic, monetize thyself!)
As 2019 came to a close, I felt the urge to
point out how “awards season” had steadily
moved from being an occasionally fun
distraction and industry subject to a gov-
erning framework for much public writing
on film (or at least some of the loudest).
What once was a diverting realm of possi-
bility now seemed to be the only game in
town, or rather, the only playing field on
which some films existed for many writers,
and implicitly a license to ignore other
movies. Likewise, streaming has become
as inescapable as “the weather” as a topic
in movie discourse—and, in a strange bit
of linguistic drift, a consumer category of
delivery, sorting, and viewing has somehow
become a catchall term for moving-image
stuff. (Which reminds me of a tagline for
the late Larry Cohen’s 1985 opus The Stuff:
5 6 | F I L M C OMM ENT | January-February 2020
“Are you eating it... or is it eating you?”)
I thought about writing all that up, and
then (as if in some natural immunoreac-
tion) I decided instead to write about love.
Sure, the class tensions in the tale-of-
two-houses poll winner Parasite, or the
differently stratified Atlantics, or Synonyms
and its thoroughgoing sense of outsider-
ness might have seemed to have a lock on
any year-round analysis, especially against
the backdrop of 21st-century plutocracy.
But my eyes instead are drawn to the utter
folly of love portrayed in Ryûsuke Hama-
guchi’s Asako I & II, a film whose compar-
atively small release did not prevent our
contributors from remembering its great
heart, heedlessly romantic and baffling in
the truest way. And managing to reinvent
the camera’s view on that most durable of
screen subjects, Céline Sciamma’s Portrait
of a Lady on Fire closes the year with a
stunning telling of the age-old artist-and-
muse story, merging its painter’s perspec-
tive with the look of desire, and discover-
ing each anew. Its final scene sits at the top
of the year’s proudly and exhilaratingly
melodramatic highs.
That’s only the start of what resembles
a veritable map of the human heart in
our favorite films from 2019. Not that
it was all as head-spinning as those two
examples: on the contrary, it was also a
banner year for gruesome breakups. I’ve
already written at length in these pages
about Marriage Story, though a couple of
scenes returned to mind recently: Scarlett
Johansson’s one-take monologue, which
on stage would probably necessitate a turn
into a spotlight; and Adam Driver’s it’s-
just-a-flesh-wound approach to managing
emotions, as he lies bleeding on the floor
of his desperately sparse bachelor pad.
Also a memory piece (as Portrait is too,
retold in response to a student’s question),
The Souvenir turns Joanna Hogg’s wide-
frame, depth-of-field stagings into a place
for remembrance of past love, and pain,
which you could revisit and turn over and
over in your head.
A memory piece of a different sort,
Once Upon a Time... in Hollywood sees
Quentin Tarantino enacting total recall
on 1960s L.A., through the eyes of two
super friends whose camaraderie I’d call
loving in a heartbeat. But when it came
to the bonds of family, there was con-
siderable turmoil simmering under the
surface, the years of familiarity exploding
with unpredictable force. I’m thinking
of The Irishman, and the Anna Paquin
character’s now infamous silent reproach,
echoed later by another sister, both fearful
and resentful of the violence behind their
father’s protectiveness. Ad Astra likewise
struck a chord, with a son traveling mil-
lions of miles to finally broach a father’s
fortress of solitude (curiously, a second
film in which Brad Pitt plays the good
soldier). Finally, and most perversely, Claire
Denis’s High Life finds no solace in space as
a father and daughter, born under a dark
star, seek the annihilating union of a black
hole’s singularity. There’s more hope, albeit
amidst great suffering, to be had in the
families-as-teams of Parasite and Us, each
facing different all-consuming crises.
But it’s self-love that beats within the
heart of two more of this year’s chart-top-
pers. In Pain and Glory, a supremely tender
Antonio Banderas gives us an aging artist
who comes to terms with himself, while
Adam Sandler in Uncut Gems (which might
also be called Pain and Glory) hurtles into
a personal tragedy of unrealized self-worth,
in pursuit of the ultimate big win. Which
is all to say that the path of love is never
smooth, with the year’s leading films alter-
nately leaving us to marvel at the miracle
and mull over the wreckage. z
MAKING THE CASE continued
transition from lovers in charge of a jian-
ghu society (a Triad-like outlaw group)
to resentful survivors of an impoverished
world illustrates the dark side of China’s
macroeconomic splendor. The notions
of communal responsibility and loyalty
hardly have a place in the utterly individ-
ualistic new order. The fact that Qiao and
Bin’s bond was outlined, though not devel-
oped, in Jia’s Unknown Pleasures (2002),
and that Qiao travels through the rising
water of the Three Gorges Dam in 2006,
the year Jia shot his Golden Lion–winner
Still Life there, adds a self-reflexive swing to
Ash Is Purest White’s devastating portrait of
beautiful creatures crushed by the wave of
the future.—Manu Yáñez Murillo
PAIN AND GLORY
Sublimation is very real in Pedro
Almodóvar’s infinitely moving new film,
which reprises his cinema’s enduring
themes. A restless film director, Salva-
dor—Antonio Banderas in the role of his
career as Almodóvar’s frail alter ego—seeks
out an actor with whom he’d had an epic
falling out decades earlier. As they indulge
in drugs, Salvador’s past floods in via
flashbacks: his childhood, sexual awaken-
ing, and adored yet forbidding mother. A
fictionalized memoir, which includes an
appraisal of multiple chronic ailments, the
film deploys stylish animation and under-
stated yet pointed realism to depict debili-
tating pain. What Salvador calls “the aching
of the soul” doubles as a fearful premoni-
tion of waning vitality and old age. A film
whose silences linger more powerfully than
its words, Almodóvar’s exploration of the
eternal ache that is the human condition is
indeed glorious.—Ela Bittencourt
UNCUT GEMS
Inspired by a mentor of their father’s, Josh
and Benny Safdie’s Diamond-District roller
coaster is New York poetry at its most
electric, concrete, human-to-human, and
plain crazy. Relentlessly in motion, a per-
manent grin on his face, unflappable even
as he emerges fully naked from the trunk
of a car, Adam Sandler is Howard Ratner,
a 47th Street jeweler, who believes his only
lost bet is the one he didn’t place. Per the
Safdies’ affectionate definition, Howard is
“a dreamer”; or, as Lakeith Stanfield puts it
in the film, “just a fucking crazy-ass Jew.”
His next big thing involves an Ethiopian
opal; former Celtics star Kevin Garnett
(playing a superstitious version of himself);
and Judd Hirsch, Eric Bogosian, and Idina PERSONAL BESTS continued
Menzel thrown in with a handful of first-
time actors—all in a manic plot set to Daniel J. HOBERMAN (The New York Times)
Lopatin’s retro synth score. A film 10 years 1. Transit
in the making, Uncut Gems spins through 2. Synonyms
Midtown as if Hudson Yards and the Trump 3. The Image Book
presidency never existed—not unlike Joker, 4. Charlie Says
it is ’70s filmmaking reimagined for the third 5. Long Day’s Journey Into Night
millennium.—Giulia D’Agnolo Vallan 6. Barbara Rubin & the Exploding NY
Underground
MARRIAGE STORY 7. Ash Is Purest White
“Somebody need me too much / Some- 8. Climax
body know me too well...” The newest film 9. Once Upon a Time... in Hollywood
10. The Irishman
from Noah Baumbach, American cinema’s
poet laureate of family dysfunction, is also
NELLIE KILLIAN (Film Comment)
his most substantial and revelatory opus
American Factory
to date. With an excruciatingly nuanced
Chained for Life
emotional realism, Marriage Story convinc- Diamantino
ingly, systematically depicts the structural The Hottest August
dismantling of a marriage between two The Irishman
people who were once deeply in love, a Our Time
pair of artists with creatively adjacent but Pain and Glory
fundamentally incompatible personal and The Plagiarists
professional visions for their own lives. The The Souvenir
great marvel of Baumbach’s film is that its Transit
central performances, abetted by a richly
empathetic script, manage to make sense of MICHAEL KORESKY (Reverse Shot)
the seeming paradox or folly or absurdity at Ash Is Purest White
the heart of the mythic institution of mar- Atlantics
riage: that real, functional love between two End of the Century
flawed but decent people can happen au- The Irishman
thentically, can be transformed by external Pain and Glory
circumstances as well as by its own internal Parasite
mechanisms, and can finally run its course. Portrait of a Lady on Fire
With great humor and a narrative deftness The Souvenir
that belies the existential magnitude of its 3 Faces
implications, Baumbach unspools a ballad Uncut Gems
that utterly dignifies the plain grandiosity
of its title, and renders the whole exquisitely DENNIS LIM (Film at Lincoln Center)
wrenching picture suffused with something 1. Transit
2. La Flor
like hope.—Madeline Whittle
3. Once Upon a Time... in Hollywood
4. An Elephant Sitting Still
LA FLOR
5. Ash Is Purest White
Possessed of a profound understanding of
6. Long Day’s Journey Into Night
the prismatic power of duration, Mariano 7. Synonyms
Llinás’s 14-hour, six-part genre safari exalts 8. Hotel by the River
in artifice, drawing us into a latticework 9. What You Gonna Do When the World’s
of narratives within narratives that, like on Fire?
dreams, accrue uncanny poignancy by 10. Genèse
having nearly all of their disparate sets of
characters embodied by the same quartet of OLAF MÖLLER
extraordinary actors. The singular allure of Asuran
La Flor is unimaginable without the elastic Apollo 11
and charismatic Laura Paredes, Pilar Gam- Charlie Says
boa, Elisa Carricajo, and Valeria Correa, who Funan
seem to both surrender to and determine A Hidden Life
the project’s endlessly playful, trope-loving In Fabric
tenor. Surveyed as a whole, La Flor’s epi- The Irishman
sodes constitute an idiosyncratic history of Integrity
cinema, opening with a mummy movie—an Non-Fiction
ingenious wink toward Argentina’s special One Cut of the Dead
January-February 2020 | F ILM COM MEN T | 5 7
 S PECI AL SE CT ION B EST FI LMS OF 201 9
MAKING THE CASE continued
relationship to repressed history—before
shifting into tales of music industry romance,
high-stakes espionage, pastoral farce, frontier
conflict, and Mounties, not to mention an
absurdly protracted closing credits sequence.
The unruly runtime contributes to this
unsynopsizable epic’s tantalizing, cultish
ambience; its status as an elusive colossus; its
insistence that cinema can retain some genu-
ine mystery and reward its audience with the
earned knowledge of filmgoing as a truly col-
lective, corporeal experience.—José Teodoro
AN ELEPHANT SITTING STILL
An adaptation of the director’s own short
story, Hu Bo’s An Elephant Sitting Still has
been hailed as a miserabilist masterpiece
and a lyrical suicide note since its premiere
at the 2018 Berlinale, four months after
Hu’s suicide. Viewed in the continual dis-
sipation of truth that comprised the events
of 2019, Hu’s commitment to the reality
of its four main characters is moving and
radical, creating a sharp contrast with the
selfish, frenzied individualism of their sur-
roundings. Almost every scene is a single
epic tracking shot (by cinematographer
Fan Chao) that focuses on the faces of each
protagonist. Off-screen deaths propel the
plot over the course of one eventful day
in industrial northern China, entwining
the orbits of two high school students, a
retired grandfather, and a local gangster
in the logics of ensemble movies. Though
initially at odds and admitting vastly dif-
ferent degrees of responsibility for the grim
violence, their enduring acts of kindness
are from each to another. All seek solace in
the titular elephant, a commodity whose
motionlessness could be fatalistic, or a
refusal to participate in its own spectacu-
larization. It is that resistance to which the
characters also hold fast.—Abby Sun
LONG DAY’S JOURNEY INTO NIGHT
Like a film noir recalled in a fever dream,
Long Day’s Journey Into Night is at once
hauntingly familiar and unfathomably
strange. Detective story conventions—the
search for a vanished woman, murky hints
of past crimes—linger like runic signs
whose meanings have been lost. Poetic
images recur insistently, like unsolved clues:
broken clocks, apples, honey, rain. Film-
maker Bi Gan returns to his home province
in southern China, the setting of his 2015
debut Kaili Blues, a region of perennially
weeping skies and peeling walls, saturated
with a brooding atmosphere of melancholy
5 8 | F IL M C O MM ENT | January-February 2020
An Elephant Sitting Still
and decay. The second half of Long Day’s
Journey Into Night is a film within a film,
an hour-long, single-shot, 3D tour de force
that doubles down on dream logic—are
all the women we see really the same
woman?—and on the noir trope of the city
as a dark labyrinth. The whole movie swims
in a flood of enigmatic images, soaked in
gorgeous color but rough with grit and
shadows, so vivid and tactile that you leave
with their marks on your skin, a dank
smell of yearning and sadness on your
clothes.—Imogen Sara Smith
SYNONYMS
A love letter to Paris drenched in ambiva-
lence, as well as an act of cinematic aggres-
sion both obvious and opaque, Synonyms
is disturbing, anguished, and extremely
funny. Nadav Lapid describes his assured,
quasi-autobiographical third feature as
“the story of an Israeli guy who decides to
leave Israel to heal himself from the Israeli
sickness and to become French”—trading
one cultural narcissism for another. Yoav
(Tom Mercier, a former judo champ, at
once forbiddingly impassive and physically
expressive) arrives in Paris to an empty flat.
Naked from a shower and panicked with
the realization that someone has stolen
his belongings, he’s taken in by an urbane
young couple reminiscent of the fashion-
able sibs who adopt a gauche American in
The Dreamers, Bernardo Bertolucci’s risible
paean to May ’68. Despite several alarming
Israelis, Synonyms has as much or more to
do with France as with Yoav’s native land.
Indeed, in its manic desire to expose French
hypocrisy, the movie suggests a madcap
rejoinder to Sartre’s Anti-Semite and Jew,
made with intimations of the Marx Brothers
and an insolence rivaling that of the young
Philip Roth.—J. Hoberman
ASAKO I & II
While at first glance Asako I & II seems a
striking departure from Happy Hour—Ryû-
suke Hamaguchi’s breakout 2015 drama—it
is also entirely consistent with the Japanese
director’s decade-plus of narrative film-
Synonyms
making, so much of which is invested in
dissecting the nuances of romantic love and
the counterintuitive impulses that lead us
to disaster. In Asako I & II, these thematic
preoccupations take the shape of a commer-
cial love-triangle drama wherein a young
woman is forced to choose between two
men in her life who, in an intriguing twist,
are identical—a potentially soapy setup
that Hamaguchi masterfully transforms
into a mystery-laden consideration of the
trauma of heartbreak and the inscrutability
of desire. It’s a remarkable feat of filmmak-
ing that again finds the director making
the most of his performers—especially
newcomer Erika Karata as Asako, whose
affectless gaze perfectly encapsulates the
film’s many enigmas and traumas, in one of
the most misunderstood performances in
recent memory.—K. F. Watanabe
US
In Jordan Peele’s approach to horror film-
making, genre tropes, pop-culture refer-
ences, and social commentary spiral around
each other like layers of a Rubik’s Cube
until they lock in place with a satisfying
click. A movie as clever and fetishistically
plotted as Us risks being swallowed up by
the think pieces it’s built to generate, but at
the heart of this elaborate home-invasion
story—which follows a middle-class black
family as it defends itself against a gang of
subterranean doppelgangers—is a vision of
American injustice as clear-eyed as anything
in recent cinema. The film’s power lies in
the way that it conveys its heady hall-of-
mirrors concept through sounds and images
of haunting immediacy: the eerie school-
yard whistles that permeate the soundtrack,
the golden blades of a lethally sharp pair of
scissors. And then there’s Peele’s greatest
weapon of all: a brilliantly weird double per-
formance by Lupita Nyong’o, whose hollow,
dry-throated vocal delivery seems to emerge
straight from the abyss.—Andrew Chan
THE IMAGE BOOK
Late Godard is ruminative but also sting-
ingly prescient. While JLG’s latest opus,

Us
The Image Book (not his last, hopefully, as
Scenario has been announced as his next
film), feels like a throwback to his mon-
umental encyclopedic essayistic survey,
Histoire(s) du cinéma, and a continuation
of his obsession with language—its defi-
ciencies as much as its double entendres,
and its textual codes across media (cin-
ema, literature, painting, music). This
near-breathless contrapuntal montage of
associative fragments, acid-colored pas-
sages, and multi-layered sonic collage is,
ultimately, a deeply moving disquisition
on the contemporary state of war and
colonial annihilation and expansionism,
as well as an ode to knowledge at a time
of historical amnesia and anti-intellec-
tualism. As incandescent and moving as
it is idiosyncratic and willfully obscure,
Godard’s film excavates the past as he
excoriates the present over five chapters
and a coda, in which one senses sustained
twilight rather than nightfall. Quoting de
Rougemont’s “It is within hope that we
are alive,” Godard remains fervently alive
to the possibilities of art to mine the dia-
lectics of creation-destruction in order to
soothe one’s soul.—Andréa Picard
PORTRAIT OF A LADY ON FIRE
There has never been a movie romance like
this before. The acclaimed costume drama
by French writer-director Céline Sciamma
(Water Lilies, Girlhood) centers on a soon-
to-be-betrothed woman on a remote island
off the coast of Brittany in 1770, Héloïse
(Adèle Haenel), and her portrait-painter-
turned-lover, Marianne (Noémie Merlant).
The film inhabits the feminine gaze on sev-
eral frequencies. Sciamma reimagines his-
tory—both cinematic and otherwise—with
her part-austere, part-lush direction; a script
that won the screenplay prize at Cannes;
multitudes of Bogie and Bacall–esque repar-
tee; and an structure in which men appear
only in the beginning and end. Haenel and
Merlant, endlessly supplanting each other
as the female subject and object of desire at
the center of the story, are a revelation. As
with all transcendent and original works of
PERSONAL BESTS continued
ANDRÉA PICARD
(Toronto International Film Festival)
1. Transit
2. An Elephant Sitting Still
3. The Souvenir
4. The Image Book
5. Synonyms
6. Grass
Ad Astra 7. Ash Is Purest White
8. In My Room
art, one walks away in awe, amazed to have 9. What You Gonna Do When the World’s
borne witness.—Jessica Green on Fire?
10. La Flor
AD ASTRA
Coolly pitched and beautifully composed, JONATHAN ROMNEY
James Gray’s film manages to balance 1. An Elephant Sitting Still
tonal shifts between Brad Pitt’s earnest, 2. The Irishman
solemn voiceover (as an astronaut in 3. Long Day’s Journey Into Night
search of his father, played by Tommy Lee 4. Sunset
Jones) and occasional bursts of hyper-vi- 5. Parasite
olent thriller material. The curious mix- 6. Los Reyes
ture of philosophical, emotive personal 7. For Sama
odyssey and honest-to-goodness B-movie 8. Marriage Story
gore is compellingly fresh. And though 9. The Souvenir
the film’s tropes are familiar—man goes 10. The Lighthouse
all the way to outer space to resolve emo-
tional issues—the extent of the film’s
IMOGEN SARA SMITH
1. Transit
grappling with traditional masculinity
2. Pain and Glory
is not. In a stoic performance with the 3. The Irishman
frisson of underlying vulnerability, Pitt 4. Parasite
both provides and undercuts the image 5. Atlantics
of astronaut as lamp-jawed macho man. 6. Once Upon a Time... in Hollywood
In so doing, he gives the second of two 7. The Souvenir
genuinely great performances from last 8. Honeyland
year.—Christina Newland 9. Long Day’s Journey Into Night
10. The Eyes of Orson Welles
LITTLE WOMEN (BONUS)
The joy one feels in running, leaping, AMY TAUBIN (Film Comment/Artforum)
dancing, and tumbling down the stairs pro- 1. Honeyland
pels Greta Gerwig’s screen performances. 2. The Sky Socialist: Environs and Out-Takes
In her adaptation of Louisa May Alcott’s 3. The Irishman
19th-century young adult novel Little 4. Parasite
Women, that kineticism defines the entire 5. The White Album
world of the March family as Gerwig hur- 6. Give Me Liberty
tles them not only through space, but also 7. Us
back and forth in time through the decade 8. To the Ends of the Earth
9. Little Women
of their coming of age. The energy of the
10. Portrait of a Lady on Fire
four March sisters is barely contained by
the walls of their small, pretty house, but
GIULIA D’AGNOLO VALLAN
unlike most modern depictions of teenage (Venice Film Festival)
girls, there is not even a hint of disruptive Ad Astra
sexuality in Jo, Meg, Amy, and Beth, which Alita: Battle Angel
is oddly liberating. Alcott’s novel is largely Aquarela
about Jo, her alter ego, and the Jo that Atlantics
Gerwig and Saoirse Ronan create matches Charlie Says
and even exceeds the Jo that readers imag- Dolemite Is My Name
ined: a Jo who demands freedom to express Dragged Across Concrete
her mind, soul, and body, and finds it Glass
through writing—her vocation and, halle- Joker
lujah, paying job.—Amy Taubin z Rolling Thunder Revue: A Bob Dylan Story
January-February 2020 | F I LM C O MM E NT | 5 9
The Square
PRECISION
STRIKES
A SINGLE SCENE IS ALL THAT SOME
ACTORS NEED TO LEAVE A MARK.
STEVEN MEARS ON MAKING IT COUNT
6 0 | F IL M C O MMEN T | January-February 2020
THE SQUARE: COURTESY OF CURZON ARTIFICIAL EYE
M
y favorite moment in citizen kane has
nothing to do with deep focus or low angles or
antique sleds. It’s the scene where Mr. Bernstein
(Everett Sloane), Kane’s kindhearted business
manager, recalls a day in 1896 when he spotted
a girl with a white parasol on a ferry about to
dock as his own was pulling away. “I only saw her for one sec-
ond,” he muses. “She didn’t see me at all, but I’ll bet a month
hasn’t gone by since that I haven’t thought of that girl.” Bernstein
is an incurable romantic, but he’s learned—as only one can,
the hard way—that a momentous encounter doesn’t need a lot
of time, or a lot of talk, or even a shred of context, to become
CITIZEN KANE: ALEX KAHLE/RKO/KOBAL/SHUTTERSTOCK
enshrined in the memory. Sometimes one second is enough.
And sometimes, in the case of a movie, one scene is plenty.
When performer and material are simpatico, screen time hardly
matters; our sojourn with them is no less resonant for its brevity,
and quite often more so. As long as we’re on Kane, consider Agnes
Moorehead’s fleeting appearance as the future tycoon’s near-som-
nambulant mother, signing him over to a banker’s custody with
no outward emotion, but suggesting the source of her fugue state
by resolving to send the boy where his father “can’t get at him.”
Many critics including Roger Ebert have suggested that Moore-
head gives the film’s greatest performance, despite putting less
than four minutes on the clock, as it were. Why, then, must our
Citizen Kane
fealty to a star system—one that periodically changes its face but
never loosens its grip—prevent us from fully acknowledging the
contributions of sub-supporting actors, or thinking of them in
more nuanced terms than that of the cameo, with its connotation
of guest stars winking their way to a fast paycheck?
Indeed, I couldn’t tell you whodunit in Hawks’s The Big Sleep,
but my mind’s eye returns to Dorothy Malone’s amorous book-
seller, assenting to share a bottle of rye—and whatever may fol-
low—with Bogart, by closing the door, turning to face him, and
lowering the shade behind her back. Or to Madeleine Lebeau, the
French actress who fled to Lisbon with her Jewish husband, and,
via forged letters of transit, found herself on the Warner Brothers
January-February 2020 | F I L M C OMM EN T | 61
lot playing a version of her own story in Casablanca—singing
“La Marseillaise” defiantly as tears stream down her cheeks.
Unsurprisingly, we seem to get the tangiest micro-performances
whenever the reigning caste of movie stars is at its most stolid or
self-regarding. The late ’80s and early ’90s—a time when Stal-
lone, Schwarzenegger, and Cruise held sway at the box office—
gave us such vivid personages as Dean Stockwell’s gatekeeper
to a nocturnal netherworld in Blue Velvet; Forest Whitaker’s
youngblood pool shark, blithely outhustling the hustler in The
Color of Money; Donald Sutherland’s velvet-voiced purveyor of
intrigue in JFK; and Tom Waits’s philosophical beggar (“kind of a
moral traffic light”) in The Fisher King. Justly or not, the best-re-
membered scene in the 1992 film version of Glengarry Glen Ross
is one that did not exist in Mamet’s Pulitzer Prize–winning play:
Alec Baldwin’s vitriolic motivator explaining the rules of the new
office sales contest, in which third prize is unemployment.
The industry has since changed, as has our relationship to
movie stars, but the past decade has continued to offer a profu- The Social Network
sion of intelligent acting in the margins. Last year saw Ray Liotta
and Virginia Madsen do some of the best work of their careers in manic, but it’s Mara who escalates the altercation by degrees,
glorified cameos—he in Marriage Story, she in Her Smell—while through expert deployment of sarcasm that Mark is too narcissis-
Steppenwolf Theatre co-founder Jeff Perry stole the true-crime tic to perceive as such (“You would do that for me?”) and redirec-
drama Trial by Fire in one scene as an oddball arson investigator. tion of his own patronizing words (“Well, I want to be straight-
Paradoxically, as these roles grow more plentiful in the mar- forward with you”). The scene shuttles through so many key
ketplace, they’re all but vanishing from the awards circuit, with changes that lacking a performer with Mara’s gifts of modulation,
supporting actor contests becoming battlegrounds for second it would seem hopelessly histrionic. All the constituent elements
leads happy to take a nominal demotion to avoid competing with of The Social Network are italicized: Fincher’s direction, Sorkin’s
their co-stars. Brad Pitt’s presumptive supporting nod for Once script, Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross’s music, the eccentric per-
Upon a Time… in Hollywood usurps the category from his aged- formances by Eisenberg, Andrew Garfield, and Justin Timberlake,
like-fine-vinegar scene partner Bruce Dern, much as how four and the use of CGI to make two Armie Hammers for the price of
years earlier Carol’s Rooney Mara was shoehorned into that field one. Mara becomes the anchor of normalcy in absentia—some-
at the expense of her sublime co-star Sarah Paulson, who actually what surprisingly in hindsight, given that her screen image has
belonged there. since become marked by aloofness, melancholy, and even, in

M
Fincher’s The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, an antisocial nature.
ara, meanwhile, had her own here-and-gone But within these spheres of toxic collegiate and corporate mas-
moment of revelation in David Fincher’s The culinity, the fresh-faced Erica is the most well-adjusted person by
Social Network (2010): apart from a brief second far. Is it any wonder that she’s banished straightaway?
scene and the odd momentary cutaway, her role While Mara’s then-unknown-quantity status helped her
concludes before her name appears in the opening make an impression in her limited screen time, occasionally the
credits. But as Erica, the soon-to-be ex-girlfriend opposite is true: our cumulative memories and past associations
whom Mark Zuckerberg (Jesse Eisenberg) insults, contrives Facebook of the performer give their single scene added heft or authen-
to spite, and then pines for dejectedly, Mara is the film’s structuring ticity. Nowhere is this more evident than in Harry Belafonte’s
absence—and not a forfeited prize, but a self-realized individual. brief but galvanizing appearance in last year’s Spike Lee–directed
In the film’s loquacious prologue, which plants Eisenberg and BlacKkKlansman. Our awareness that the 91-year-old singer and
Mara dead-center in a crowded frame facing one another, Mark actor was a towering figure in the American civil rights move-
prattles on about Harvard final clubs and other yardsticks of ment, helping to finance
THE SOCIAL NETWORK: COLUMBIA/KOBAL/SHUTTERSTOCK
success. Typical of screenwriter Aaron Sorkin, the couple thrust Even with the requisite the 1961 Freedom Rides
and parry with words, their tangents ricocheting off other tangents metronomic delivery, and organize the March
(“I didn’t know they take SATs in China”; “I wasn’t talking about on Washington in 1963,
China anymore, I was talking about me”). While more than able to
Rooney Mara makes contributes moral weight
hold her own in Sorkin’s verbal gymnastics, Erica seems to stand her baroque dialogue and gravitas to his portrait
in for his critics when she snaps at Mark, “Sometimes you say two in The Social Network of aged activist Jerome
things at once and I’m not sure which one I’m supposed to be sound natural and Turner. Invited to address a
aiming at!” Later she angrily asserts that she’s not speaking in code, Colorado university’s Black
which could be read as a veiled reference to how all the writer’s
spontaneous; cru- Student Union, Turner
creations (now including the children in his Broadway adaptation cially, she maneuvers offers a sickening firsthand
of To Kill a Mockingbird) express themselves through complex the opening scene account of the kangaroo
semantics and circumlocution. through its many tonal trial and public lynching
Even with the requisite metronomic delivery, Mara makes her of Jesse Washington, a
baroque dialogue sound natural and spontaneous; crucially, she shifts, from playful to mentally handicapped black
maneuvers the scene through its many tonal shifts, from playful aggrieved to indignant. teenager accused of raping a
to aggrieved to indignant. Eisenberg is effectively prickly and white woman in 1916.

6 2 | F IL M C O MME NT | January-February 2020


BlacKkKlansman
We hear Belafonte’s words—“It started out as a nice spring
day back there in Waco, Texas”—before we see his face. Lee pans
across an attentive student crowd, some seated, others standing
in back or scrunched onto the stairwell, “Free Angela” posters
lining the walls behind them. The voice that crooned “Day-O”
more than six decades ago is now raspy and frail but resolute.
On speaking the words “Jesse Washington was a friend of mine,”
Belafonte turns his head one-quarter right to face the camera,
and as we lock eyes with him, the force of his presence hits us like
a lightning bolt. It’s like being confronted by history itself.
Lee frequently repositions his camera to show Belafonte
from a different angle or distance; far from being distracting,
this invigorates his testimony, magnifying without diluting his
minimalist gestures. Belafonte scarcely speaks above a whisper;
the clasping of his hands provides punctuation, but the power
derives from his horrifying words. Following Turner’s divulgence
of especially disturbing details about Washington’s trial (like the
jury’s deliberation time of four minutes), Lee cuts to an initiation
ceremony of the local chapter of the KKK, attended by Grand
Wizard David Duke (a fittingly feckless Topher Grace). The bril-
liance of the sequence’s design becomes clear when Turner notes
that the resurgence of Klan activity followed on the heels of D.W.
Griffith’s 1915 release The Birth of a Nation—and Lee shows the
film being simultaneously screened by the new inductees of the
KKK, who hoot and cheer as though it were a raucous comedy.
Griffith’s notorious milestone is credited with pioneering the
grammar of film as a narrative medium, including cross-cutting
between synchronous events. By adopting that same technique
to demonstrate the harm caused by irresponsible art, Lee wrests
BLACKKKLANSMAN: DAVID LEE/FOCUS FEATURES
it away from Griffith and reclaims it. And in ending the episode
with Turner’s words “In the name of black power,” inciting the
students to unify for the sake of progress, Lee is showing us not
just the ideological legacy of Jerome Turner but also its continua-
tion in the form of his heir, Harry Belafonte, strong and commit-
ted and unbearably poignant, his fortitude undiminished by age.
You also feel the accrued mileage in the bearing of 88-year-old
character actress Margaret Bowman in David Mackenzie’s 2016
neo-western Hell or High Water. Unnamed and visible for a mere
minute and a half, Bowman’s steakhouse waitress, aptly described
as a rattlesnake, affords the most memorable eatery standoff since
Jack Nicholson told his server where she could hold the chicken
in Five Easy Pieces. She enters the frame with the priceless open-
ing salvo “What don’t you want?”, allowing diners Jeff Bridges
and Gil Birmingham to reject only items that aren’t on the menu,
thus presenting the hilarious illusion of choice. (They’re going to
get T-bone steaks, baked potatoes, and iced tea. Steaks are cooked
medium rare. That weren’t no question.)
The late Bowman, who turned to acting in middle age after
raising a family, was a West Texas mainstay beloved by casting
directors and co-stars alike. She frequently turned up in small
local-color parts in films like Christopher Guest’s Waiting for
Guffman (as the costume designer) and the Coens’ No Country
for Old Men (as the motel clerk). A serious actress who devised
elaborate backstories for her walk-on roles (in her mind, the
T-bone waitress was named Maisie and moved home 44 years
earlier to care for her ailing mother-in-law), Bowman based the
character on her own favorite waitress, an elderly woman who
clasped her back in pain when she walked, a small detail she
weaves into her performance. What might’ve been a broad comic
showcase for a trouper like Cloris Leachman feels uncannily
real in Bowman’s careworn hands. She would no more play her
material for laughs (an absurd digression about a New Yorker
who tried to order trout back in 1987 is delivered with rancor
that still feels raw) than question Maisie’s choice to use a pen and
pad when the menu consists of one meal. Her scene is the kind
of texture-supplying interlude that separates serviceable genre
stories from exceptional slices of life.
Enigmatic and vibrantly clad in Lee Chang-dong’s Burning,
South Korean actress Ban Hye-ra would seem to have little in
common with Bowman, except that both are afforded less than two
minutes on screen to limn unapologetic women marked by local
economic realities. Alluded to in tantalizingly elliptical fashion before
surfacing unexpectedly, Ban’s absentee mother of antihero Jong-su
(Yoo Ah-in) reaches out halfheartedly to her now-adult son. Con-
sistent with the film’s simmering ambiguity, Ban’s preoccupied air
keeps us wondering if she’s happy to see Jong-su or simply drowning
in debt and looking for a bailout. The last in a sequence of emotional
vampires who feed on Jong-su, she’s just another spectral presence
in her son’s life, another party he must strive to please but ultimately
disappoint. Smiling mechanically, Ban yields a fascinating blend of
practiced warmth and distracted disdain.
S
ometimes a scene can articulate the movie’s key
ideas through a character with no relevance to its
plot. That’s the case with the disquieting setpiece
in Ruben Östlund’s 2017 The Square that involves
performance artist Oleg Rozojin (Terry Notary).
At a black-tie dinner for patrons of the X-Royal art
museum in Stockholm, Oleg’s impression of a rampant ape first
titillates, then alarms and infuriates the guests.
Motion-capture performer and former Cirque du Soleil star
Notary was discovered by Östlund when the director Googled
“actor imitating monkey” and then viewed his audition for Rise of
the Planet of the Apes. Notary’s lurching movements are startling-
ly simian, responding to the actors in the scene (many of whom
are extras and look earnestly terrified) the way an animal reacts
to stimuli: devouring approval but lashing out against taunts
or displays of fear. Oleg continues his act even when ordered
to stand down by the museum curator, grabbing a woman by
the hair and mounting her, while for a long time (in a nod to
Östlund’s prior Force Majeure) the well-heeled guests are too
frozen in fright to defend her. As critic Michael Koresky observed
in these pages, the sequence is utterly detached from the rest of
the narrative: “Like those in the dining room, we’re left to wonder
what we just watched, who in the room was in on it, and what
January-February 2020 | F ILM C OMMEN T | 6 3
Nymphomaniac If Beale Street Could Talk

NYMPHOMANIAC: ZENTROPA ENTERTAINMENTS/KOBAL/SHUTTERSTOCK; IF BEALE STREET COULD TALK: ANNAPURNA PICTURES/KOBAL/SHUTTERSTOCK

parts of it were planned.” One thing is clear: Notary’s perfor- that comes after his scene feels anticlimactic. He’s first introduced
mance prompts anxiety within the film and without, confront- when they meet on the street, ostensibly carefree, filmed in slow
ing even the most broadminded of us with the boundaries and motion; later, during a conversation in Fonny’s apartment, Daniel
assurances we require to comfortably experience art. admits the darker truth: he was imprisoned for two years on an
Comfort is the last thing you look for in a Lars von Trier film, auto theft rap, despite not even knowing how to drive. His story
and in his bipartite treatise Nymphomaniac, it’s the last thing you plays out like a symphony in movements, with intermissions for
find in Uma Thurman’s tour de force of spousal recrimination. cigarettes and beer and nostalgic banter with choked, guttural
The discarded wife of one of the many lovers belonging to pro- laughs. But Daniel finds no solace in these outlets, and periodically
tagonist Joe (Charlotte Gainsbourg, and Stacy Martin in flash- retreats inward with a shattering loneliness; words don’t come as
backs), Thurman’s “Mrs. H” forces her way into Joe’s apartment easily to him now as before, and Henry bravely builds his perfor-
with her three young sons in tow. Her rage roiling under a veneer mance on a foundation of pauses, both fearful and vigilant.
of performed pathos (“My husband—oh, I’m sorry. He isn’t any- The journalist Dotun Akintoye compares Henry’s approach to
more, is he?”), Thurman leads her kids on a tour of the love nest the blues term “worrying a line,” defined by author Cheryl A. Wall as
culminating in “the whoring bed.” Thurman layers the role with “the technique of breaking up a phrase by changing pitch, adding a
extraordinary precision, cloaking her invectives in advice and shout, or repeating words in order to emphasize, clarify, or subvert a
asides to the children, who are in reality little more than props. moment in a song.” Akintoye cites as examples “the way Henry is lit,
Buffeted between false jollity at her husband’s new love, the the thick baritone of his voice, the incredible valence he can put into
smug sanctimony of her focus on the boys and their “trauma,” and an utterance, the way he says ‘scared’ and means enraged, wounded,
schadenfreude when Joe’s next gentleman caller shows up, Thur- and terrified all at once, the way he asks ‘scared of what?’ like he’s
man’s arch mannerisms finally dissolve in a primal scream at the always known the answer, the way he can be barely contained and
door: eyes narrowed, jaws clenched in fury at having no say in the then eerily still, the way he can use his eyes to leave a room only to
termination of her marriage, an unraveling worthy of prime Gena suddenly return to his body with a faint shudder.”
Rowlands. In one scene she’s raised the entire movie’s temperature The young love shared by the film’s central characters Fonny and
by supplying an otherwise missing emotion: white-hot wrath, a Tish, with attendant worries about housing, the future, and Fon-
counterpoint to the sanguinity of the young Joe, the je-ne-regrette- ny’s art, is both enviable and irretrievable to Daniel—it represents
rien confidence of the older the glories and heartaches of the life that was taken from him. Jen-
Joe, and the clinical remove Brian Tyree Henry kins deliberately pans between Fonny and Daniel to underscore
of her sheltered interroga- invests so much gen- the latter’s isolation, and the gulf of experience separating the two
tor, the bachelor Seligman. friends. No one can comprehend what those years behind bars did
When Thurman is on
uine feeling in his to Daniel, though Fonny will know soon enough. Henry’s perfor-
screen, von Trier’s puckish portrayal of Daniel, mance establishes stakes for the rest of the film, showing the effect
provocation manages to the haunted child- imprisonment can have on a robust young man with everything
provoke something most hood friend of Fonny to live for. “When you’re in there, they can do with you whatever
unexpected: genuine feeling. they want,” he intones. “What. Ever. They want.” His eyes, incan-
Brian Tyree Henry
in Barry Jenkins’s If descent with pain, betray a man always alert, always thinking, only
invests so much genuine Beale Street Could now his thoughts are channeled into brute survival. Perhaps the
feeling in his portrayal Talk, that it nearly ultimate self-knowledge is realizing the fear and shame one can
of Daniel, the haunted upends the film. be made to feel by others, and having obtained that knowledge
childhood friend of Fonny in prison, Daniel can never know peace. Tish’s interruption with
(Stephan James) in Barry Everything that comes groceries near the end of the scene is thus a significant story beat:
Jenkins’s If Beale Street after his scene feels it’s the first time since Brian Tyree Henry’s arrival on screen that
Could Talk, that it nearly anti-climactic. we are permitted to breathe. But it’s not the last time that a small
upends the film. Everything but meteoric turn will take our breath away. O

64 | F IL M C OM MENT | January-February 2020

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IN MEMORIAM Remembering cinéastes who have passed on

authority difficult to imagine Angelou, late of 2014, whose

End of the Line without a stock of lived experi-
ence behind it. The blue-collar
A roll call of the departed pioneers and character actor, exemplified by
Postlethwaite, would be less and
exemplars that we overlooked—and the histories less seen in the 2010s, during
that seemed to disappear as well which the cinema was flooded
with drama-school toffs—
BY NICK PINKERTON though we must be wary of sub-
feature screenplay for 1972’s
Georgia, Georgia was the first by
a black woman to be produced;
or Diahann Carroll, gone last
year, whose role on the 1968-71
television series Julia made her
the first black actress to star in
a TV show playing something

F
scribing to class-based essential- other than a domestic.
ilm history is very young—as old as two lifetimes, ism. Susan Tyrrell (RIP 2012)
and not even particularly long ones at that. And year after was of San Francisco socialite 2013
year, living linkages to certain discrete eras in film history stock, but who could surpass her The American avant-garde
are snipped. What follows are brief eulogies to individuals, boozy Stockton slattern in John took heavy losses through the
organized by year of death, but also eulogies to the film-historical Huston’s Fat City (1972)? decade, with the expiry of its
moments or the particular qualities that they exemplified. It does loudest proselytizers—Amos
not pretend to be a comprehensive roll call of the departed, nor Vogel (2012), late of New
could such a thing be possible, but should be taken instead as an York’s Cinema 16, and the

idiosyncratic history of the 2010s as seen through the people lost,
and what went with them.
1 recently been the most authen-
2010
The deaths this decade of
George A. Romero, Tobe
Hooper, and even Herschell
Gordon Lewis and his car-
ny-barker producer David F.
Friedman were widely noted,
but the culling of American
genre regionalists began early
with the passing of Charles
B. Pierce (1), the longtime
Texarkana resident who drew
on the lore of his native land—
his The Legend of Boggy Creek
(1972) was based on reports
of the Fouke Monster haunt-
ing Miller County, while The
Town That Dreaded Sundown
(1976) is a semidocumen-
tary slasher dramatizing the
unsolved Moonlight Murders
of 30 years earlier. Respon-
sible for a passel of brilliant
films, these figures helped in
no small way to decentralize
U.S. cinema, wresting power
from its coastal capitals with
disreputable daring.
2011
Born to a Catholic family in
Warrington, Lancashire, Peter
William Postlethwaite (2) died
two days into the year, having
tic aspect by a considerable
margin in Ben Affleck’s The
Town (2010). The embodiment
of the tyrannical working-class
patriarch in Terence Davies’s
Distant Voices, Still Lives
(1988), Postlethwaite came
from the social background de-
picted, granting him a terrible
2 on the cellblock, distinguished
3 phous-pervert lead in Ron
2012
An African-American film-
maker affiliated with the con-
federation of black UCLA Film
School graduates known as the
L.A. Rebellion, Jamaa Fanaka
(3), unlike his compatriots, was
drawn to popular idioms and
pulp filmmaking—as such, he
was an outsider twice over. His
Penitentiary trilogy (1979, 1982,
1987) is a riot, a burlesque
of ultracompetitive capitalist
society in miniature, played out
by gonzo humor and more
than a touch of the Buñuelian
absurd. Firsts in representation
are today routinely claimed
by an industrial filmmaking
system that likes to attach all
credit for progress to itself,
but in point of fact they were
earned by black talents at work
against impossible odds in the
1960s and ’70s—talents disap-
pearing fast today, like Maya
1: © AMERICAN INTERNATIONAL PIC TUR ES; 2: © 20 05 SH UTTE RSTO CK 3 : ZUMA P RES S, INC /A LAM Y STO CK PHO TO ; 4: P HO T OF EST
brothers with whom he’d
fueded bitterly, Adolfas (2011)
and Jonas Mekas (2019), both
also mighty practitioners. But
don’t forget the avant-garde
performers, particularly the
man that J. Hoberman called
“the first underground movie
star”: Taylor Mead (4), the
capering, mugging, polymor-
Rice’s The Flower Thief (1960)
4
and Andy Warhol’s incompa-
rably titled Taylor Mead’s Ass
(1964). In the year of his death
he had been bought out of his
old Ludlow St. apartment, and
he took a piece of New York
City with him. I never knew
the old NYC before Giuliani,
but seeing Mead monologue
and recite verse in his regular
slots at the Bowery Poetry
Club, you could breathe some-
thing of its air.

66 | F ILM COMMENT | January-February 2020

 I’ll long cherish the memory of drinking a 10 a.m. beer with Andrzej Żuławski at Locarno, where he lamented
to me about “this terrible boredom which assails European cinemas now, and these terrible festivals…”

5 unusual, vulnerable ingénue in
2014
Patrick Lung Kong (5) is far
from a known quantity in the
West, despite having spent his
later years on Staten Island, but
he was quietly one of the most
influential figures in Hong Kong
cinema. A champion of dramas
in the local Cantonese tongue
during a period when Mandarin
ruled, Lung Kong turned out
stylistically adventurous, pas-
sionate social dramas like Teddy
Girls (1969) and The Story of a
Discharged Prisoner (1967), to
which early acolyte John Woo—
who as a youth had observed the
master on set—and Tsui Hark
turned for source material when
making A Better Tomorrow
(1986). A mentor and facilitator
5 : COURTESY FAR EAST FILM F ESTIV AL; 6: K OBA L/SHU TTE RSTOCK;8: JERR Y S CHAT ZB ERG ;
Lizabeth Scott (6) died in 2015
at age 92, predeceased by her
screen career, stalled after a vi-
cious tabloid campaign circulat-
ing rumors about her sexuality,
but she left behind a handful
of top-flight noir denizens: an
André de Toth’s Pitfall (1948);
and a goddess of death in Byron
Haskin’s Too Late for Tears
(1949), which has her damn
near get away with the crime in
style. Gone too are Lauren Bacall
(2014) and Dorothy Malone
(2018), two of the moody
beauties of Howard Hawks’s The
Big Sleep (1946), and a personal
favorite, Audrey Totter (2013),
whose baleful hoyden dominates
wimpy Richard Basehart in John
Berry’s Tension (1949).
7 and Robert Forster, while the
where his Witold Gombrowicz
adaptation Cosmos premiered,
as he lamented to me about “this
terrible boredom which assails
European cinemas now, and
these terrible festivals...”
2017
The moving-image event of
2017, the 18 episodes collectively
referred to as Twin Peaks: The
Return had a funerary air. Stars
Miguel Ferrer and Warren
Frost died only months before
the series’ airing. “Log Lady”
Catherine E. Coulson—ap-
pearing frail with cancer, hair
sparse, using an oxygen tank to
breathe, enormously moving
in her handful of scenes—had
already preceded them. They
were joined in not so long a
time by Harry Dean Stanton
stock-footage specters of David
Bowie and Don S. Davis haunt
the show. The contemplation
of mortality, of course, was ad-
dressed as profoundly here as in
any American entry in a decade
unjustly forgotten figures from
the dustbin of history; quite
touchingly, he called me to
compliment something I’d
written about Don Weis. Sur-
vivors from cinephilia’s heroic
era are going in short order:
Hans Hurch, legendary Viennale
director, succumbed the year
prior, while the French film
buffs to whom we owe so much
of our understanding of the me-
dium’s history thinned in 2019
with the death of Jean Douchet,
a repository of lived knowledge
no database can equal.
9
2019
The critic Louis Skorecki called
Jean-Claude Brisseau (9) one
of two filmmakers of the last 30

to generations of filmmakers,
including Tang Shu-shuen and
Patrick Tam, Lung Kong was 2016
not only a powerful cineaste but The leading lights of the Czecho-
also a type that cinema cannot slovak New Wave have all but
do without: the great organizer been dimmed with the passing of
and well-wisher. 8øTC|%J[VKNQX½ in 2014 followed
by the deaths in 2018 of Miloš
2015 Forman and Juraj Herz. Easily
Let us say a word for the their equal was ,CP0øOGE(7),
femmes—fatale and oth- author of some of the most free,
erwise—who occupied the fierce works of the Prague Spring:
shadowy zones of the thrillers Diamonds of the Night (1964)
eventually dubbed film noir. and A Report on the Party and the
Guests (1966). At odds with his
6 country’s government and too
volatile for Hollywood, he spent
years as a wedding videographer,
only to return home in 1989 to
make fresh provocations. We
can’t hope to see again the dissi-
dent energy of these Eastern Bloc
auteurs, but I’ll long cherish the
memory of drinking a 10 a.m.
beer with interviewee Andrzej
ŎWĜCYUMK—another 2016 casual-
ty—the previous year at Locarno,
of Late Style statement films.
2018
Intimate of Clint Eastwood, foil
to Jean-Pierre Melville, O.G.
MacMahoniste shit-stirrer,
8 been tried and punished by a
Pierre Rissient (8) was a
programmer, tastemaker, and
tireless cinephile excavator until
his remarkable run came to a
close in 2018, but not before he
proclaimed Long Day’s Journey
Into Night a “flaming torch in
the heart of the night . . . a poetry
of blood.” Rissient introduced
the West to Lino Brocka and
took King Hu’s A Touch of Zen
to Cannes in 1975, retrieving
years “worthy of [the] designa-
tion of ‘director,’” but Brisseau
was always something of a cult
item, further marginalized
when a 2002 sexual harassment
case tied to the casting of his
Secret Things, for which he’d
French court, was revived in
2017 on the eve of a scheduled
Cinémathèque Française ret-
rospective. A titanic, idiosyn-
cratic post–New Wave talent,
Brisseau’s obsessive cinema, for
good or ill, belongs to an art
form still serious about sex. The
Continental sensualists whose
work has sometimes been cate-
gorized as “Eurosleaze” have no
inheritors. A moment of silence,
then, for Jesús Franco, deceased
in 2013, preceded to the grave
by his partner, collaborator, and
frequent star, Lina Romay; and
for Jean Rollin, author of The
Nude Vampire (1970) and other
works of fantastique erotica. O

January-February 2020 | F I LM C OM MEN T | 6 7

THE BIG SCREEN
Reviews of notable new films opening in theaters (hopefully near you)
The Traitor
BY M O LLY H A S KE L L
Director: Marco Bellocchio
Country/Distributor: Italy/France/Germany/
Brazil, Sony Pictures Classics
Opening: January 31
A
nother elegiac gangster film
by a septuagenarian director, Marco
Bellocchio’s Sicilian saga clocks in
at a relatively brisk two-and-a-half hours,
but, as with its American counterpart, The
Irishman, it spans continents and decades
while casting a retrospective eye over the
iniquities of the Cosa Nostra during one of
its temporary if spectacular decimations.
Dense and brooding, but, like Scorsese’s
film, vigorously told, The Traitor also
unfolds under the looming shadow of
mortality, of time running out for aging
kingpins, and of debts coming due.
At the center, a superb Pierfrancesco Fa-
vino plays Tommaso Buscetta, the informer
who fingered members of the rival Corleone
family and precipitated what was for Italy
6 8 | F IL M C O MMEN T | January-February 2020
the trial of the century: lasting from 1986
to 1992, the Maxi Trial, held the country
spellbound in a media-ready melodrama
that no playwright could invent. The scenes
portrayed are mind-boggling. In a specially
constructed courtroom within a Sicilian
prison, inmates shout from behind a glass
window. One demands to be heard as an
interrogator—the judge accedes. Another
displays a bloody mouth: he has sewn his lips
shut. Wives join the chorus, bedlam ensues.
Before then, the movie opens with a long,
noisy blast of a party, a last-ditch attempt
to reunite the two warring factions that
only reveals fraying seams in both the mob
families and the marital ones. The music
plays, couples dance; this spectacle of a tribal
culture on the verge of collapse might be the
opera buffa version of the great ballroom
scene in Visconti’s The Leopard, that valedic-
tory moment when the gentry foresees its
own demise. Buscetta momentarily leaves
the party, scanning the horizon for his son.
When he finds the drug-addled Benedetto
staggering from the sea, Father drags him
toward the villa, beating his son as he does—
the first sign of the devastation of heroin and
a foreshadowing of the calamities to come.
To escape threats on his life, Buscetta
flees to Rio, setting himself up in style in
another stunning villa overlooking the sea.
In doing so, he abandons his sons to their
fate—an act that will haunt him more than
any murders he may have directly commit-
ted. Arrested by the Brazilian police he is
subjected to information-extracting tactics
the mafia could only admire. At one point
he is flown in a helicopter over the sea and
forced to watch while his wife is dangled
from a neighboring helicopter. Senora Bus-
chetta is then transferred to America, and
if he ever wants to see her again, he must
cough up names and deeds—the ostensible
reason for his decision to turn snitch.
Because of the complexity of the
THE TRAITOR: COURTESY OF AD VITAM
film’s story, its different time frames, and
DeMille-size cast, Bellocchio furnishes
explanatory titles and bulletins for the
non-Italian viewer. In the contrapuntal
rhythm now favored by gangster films, we
cut back and forth between movement and
stasis, from violent hits—cars explode, a
warehouse reverberates with bullet fire—to
scenes of menacing quiet. Rendered back
to Palermo, Buscetta finds himself in a
series of confrontations with Giovanni
 Dense and brooding, but, like The Irishman, vigorously told, The Traitor also unfolds under the looming
shadow of mortality, of time running out for aging kingpins, and of debts coming due.
Falcone (Fausto Russo Alesi), the heroic
prosecutor who would secure some 360
convictions and pay for it with his life in a
car explosion.
Their duet begins in wary antagonism:
Buscetta claiming the new mafia is not like
the old one as he tries to portray himself as a
man of honor with shopworn and patently
false claims (never kill children; help the
poor; no trafficking in heroin), while Falcone
replies, “The older noble mafia is a myth.”
Buscetta’s charm offensive wilts before the
quiet integrity of his interrogator. The pariah
and the prosecutor, once on opposite sides,
have both become mafia targets, and as they
ruefully discuss their pending deaths, not if
but when and how, they develop a camarade-
rie that turns into affection, even love.
Aspiring to virtue according to the orig-
inal Latin definition of vir (manliness), they
are like two Roman soldiers on the battle-
field: “I who am about to die salute you.” If
this is a somewhat more heroic portrait than
Buscetta’s self-serving career and hedonistic
lifestyle (three wives on three continents)
might justify, let the record show he did go
on to furnish information to both the Italian
and U.S. governments. Thanks to his help
in the famous “Pizza Connection” case of
1985, he was given American citizenship and
a place in the witness protection program.
Unlike Falcone, he would live out his natural
life, dying of cancer in 2000 at age of 71, in
an “unidentified location.”
Bellocchio, a maestro of family—here in
both upper and lower case—portrays this
AND THEN WE DANCED: ANKA GUJABIDZE/COURTESY OF MUSIC BOX FILMS
pair’s unlikely brotherhood as the central
bond of The Traitor. As director of the har-
rowingly beautiful and perhaps unsurpassed
Beanpole
BY L AUR E N KA MI N S KY
Director: Kantemir Balagov
Country/Distributor: Russia, Kino Lorber
Opening: January 29
S
et in leningrad in the autumn
of 1945, Kantemir Balagov’s Beanpole
is about what happens when the
fighting stops but civilians are still at war.
Those who survived to see the German
surrender in May had seen a million neigh-
Fists in the Pocket (1965), his debut feature,
he has a deep feeling for the psychological
chamber music, both harsh and sweet, of the
ties that bind, and even his dramatizations
of political figures and social issues are an-
chored in micro family or familial relation-
ships. Good Morning, Night (2003), about
the abduction and killing of Aldo Moro by
the Red Brigade, finds its nerve center in
the intensely ambivalent interplay between SHORT TAKE ened the much edg-
Moro and the pretty daughter-like figure AND THEN WE ˆiÀÓä£{}i˜`iÀ‡yՈ`
of his captor though the two never actually DANCED romance Something
come face to face. Vincere (2009) relates the Must Break, endows
story of Mussolini through the eyes of the Director: Levan Akin ƂŽˆ˜½Ãw“܈̅>
mistress he once loved and later scorned. Country/Distributor: lush, ruddy color
Fists in the Pocket, the story of a provin- Sweden/Georgia/ palette. The script,
cial bourgeois family coming murderously France, Music Box unfortunately, is
apart, and made when he was only 25, was Films more perfunctory.
taken as a portent of ’60s rebellion, but over Opening: February 7 The audiences likeli-
time it has emerged as something greater est to see And Then
and more idiosyncratic: an up-close portrait Levan Akin’s Swed- We Danced are the
of sexual perversity and homicidal mania ish-Georgian co-pro- surest to know where
made more disturbing by the appalling cha- duction is a hand- it’s headed, and in
risma of its actors—an echo perhaps found some, engaging, but what order. Nearly
in Favino’s performance in The Traitor. Like predictable graft of everyone obeys the
many a spectacular debut, Fists in the Pocket familiar genres: the usual choreogra-
set a standard of expectation that was hard passion play of a phies: Merab’s fond
to meet, and unlike his contemporary Ber- young dancer, crav- but under-explored
tolucci, Bellocchio remained in Italy. But if ing a spot in the com- female partner; his
we have been exposed to less of the director’s pany, and the queer new rival in the com-
work than it warrants, it is our provincialism coming-of-age para- pany, a strapping
rather than his that bears the blame. ble, amidst repressive peer from unknown
forces of family and parts; his pessimistic
Molly Haskell has written for many publi- tradition. Akin’s script parents, themselves
cations, including The Village Voice, The vÕÃiÃ̅iÃiVœ˜yˆVÌà ex-dancers; his iron-
New York Times, Ms., Saturday Review, and by devoting his hero willed artistic direc-
Vogue. She is the author of Steven Spielberg: Merab (Levan Gel- tors. At least Merab’s
A Life in Films and From Reverence to Rape: bakhiani) to the art older brother David
The Treatment of Women in the Movies. of Georgian dance, (Giorgi Tsereteli),
where projections of set up as a nemesis,
virility and “mascu- squandering his
line” comportment talents on booze,
bors die of deprivation and bombardment have grown only more belatedly reveals
in the city that starved for two and a half
years during the blockade. Just a few
sacrosanct with time.
The best thing
some unexpected
tenderness.
months later, as the weather turns cold and }œˆ˜}vœÀ̅iw“ˆÃ /…iw“…>Ã
evacuees return, the film begins. its athletic camera, reaped audience
Eponymously lanky Iya (Viktoria weaving around and awards at multiple
Miroshnichenko, in an astonishing debut) between characters’ festivals and proven
stands in a hospital basement, white- bodies, observant of a progressive cause
blonde lashes and eyebrows disappearing their dynamism while célèbre in Georgia.
into sallow skin under yellow lights. Ksenia evoking, too, their There is much to
Sereda’s cinematography is all saturated roiling ambitions and enjoy and celebrate—
greens and reds that make the actors look unvoiced yearnings. just less to call novel,
like underground creatures blinded by their Gifted cinematog- and only modest lev-
sudden emergence into blown-out color. rapher Lisabi Fridell, els of insight.
Before we see Iya, we hear her otherworldly, who similarly enliv- —Nick Davis
January-February 2020 | F I LM C OM MEN T | 69
Ksenia Sereda’s cinematography in Beanpole is all saturated greens and reds that make the actors look
like underground creatures blinded by their sudden emergence into blown-out color.

SHORT TAKE under the guidance

YOUNG AHMED of his Imam. As is
often the case in
Directors: Luc & >À`i˜˜iÃw“Ã]
Jean-Pierre Dardenne there are no easy
Country/Distributor: villains or baldly
Belgium/France, Kino bad intentions, and
Lorber accordingly the
Opening: February 21 directors foreground guttural noises, as though a needle skipped away, Iya has another attack, and only then
Ahmed’s feelings the groove of steady breath. Iya suffers does Masha kiss her back. The sensuality
The Dardenne broth- of isolation and regular attacks that momentarily paralyze of their chapped lips and dirty fingernails
ers are known for search for a place her giant, emaciated frame and leave her is blunted by the duller sadomasochistic
wÀ“LÕÌi̅iÀi>Þ in the world, rather blank eyes unblinking. “Has she been fro- impulses that give Iya lines like “I want to
gentle narratives that than faulting faith in zen long?” one woman scrubbing hospital be the master of her.” Iya competes with
open our eyes to ܓiëiVˆwVÜ>Þ° laundry asks another. “Ages. I don’t pay Sasha for Masha, but that courtship ends
the plight of those But combined with much attention to it.” in a breathless dinner scene structured as
who are socially and the opacity of its

YOUNG AHMED: © CHRISTINE-PLENUS/COURTESY OF KINO LORBER; BEANPOLE: COURTESY OF KINO LORBER

The hospital is a warren of sex-seg- a turning point, but in which there is little
politically othered. «ÀœÌ>}œ˜ˆÃÌ]̅iw“ regated zones, and Iya, a nurse, moves movement—cinematic, emotional, or
/…iˆÀw“ȘëˆÀi creates a perplexing among them, towering over everyone in otherwise.
deep, lasting com- divide between its the wards, where doctors minister to end- “I’m sorry for the war,” Stepan (Kon-
passion because the faithful and secular less rows of maimed men. They come to stantin Balakirev), a paralyzed war veteran
viewer is invited to characters, and life when Iya brings along her son, Pashka from the hospital, says to his wife in a ten-
share in the work of seems to inherently (Timofey Glazkov), imitating animals for der sequence that is the true heart of the
building them from favor a white, west- him to name. But the boy will not survive film. He releases her from the burden he
the ground up, as ern perspective. in this city haunted by dead children. Only poses, so Iya takes her place. Like a trans-
their stories of mor- In exploring a afterward do we learn that Iya is in fact lucent angel of death with a syringe in
ally and emotionally religion that for the friend of his biological mother, Masha one hand and a cigarette in the other, she
complex people many outsiders is (Vasilisa Perelygina), Beanpole’s soldier blows smoke into Stepan’s open mouth,
unfold without judg- grossly, inaccurately returning from the front. watching him purse his lips to catch it
ment. In their latest synonymous with Masha is a kinetic counterpoint to Iya’s until there is no more breath.
w“]…œÜiÛiÀ]̅i terrorist belief and leaden stillness. After learning of Pashka’s Balagov has said that his script (written
directors’ approach action, providing death, she arranges to trade sex for food, with Alexander Terekhov) was inspired by
is not quite as suc- greater context on laughing through a mechanical encoun- Svetlana Alexievich’s oral history of wom-
cessful in realizing what Islam offers ter with chinless Sasha (Igor Shirokov). en in the Great Patriotic War, which is full
this humanist vision, Ahmed that he’s Seeing their naked bodies at the women’s of soldiers unable to have children and
perhaps because of so desperately bath the next day, we begin to understand caretakers who fail to return children to
the intensely polar- lacking—or just a that Masha cannot have another child; in their demobilized mothers. In Alexievich’s
izing nature of the few more bread- her perverse accounting, Iya owes her one. work, these stories add up to something
subject matter. crumbs regarding There is a strong sadistic current in more than suffering. The soldier, the
Young Ahmed his particular moti- Beanpole that exceeds the abjection of its grieving mother, and the war widow are
follows the indeed vations—might subject matter. We see it first in Pashka’s standard in the iconography of memorial-
very young and very have given a better death, and it returns when we witness Iya ization, but Iya’s war is singular, and she is
determined Ahmed understanding of enduring sex she does not want. If Iya by far the best element of this film.
(Idir Ben Addi), living this challenging wants bodily contact, she wants it with
in a small Belgian but still empathetic Masha, clutching her even during an Lauren Kaminsky is a historian and the
town, as he begins character.—Farihah agonizing sex scene devoid of pleasure. Director of Studies in History and Litera-
to rapidly radicalize Zaman Later, Iya kisses her, Masha pushes her ture at Harvard University.

7 0 | F I LM C OM MENT | January-February 2020

 Dig a millimeter beneath the surface of the ubiquitous art-directed grime of 1917 and you’ll catch the antiseptic
smell of the Great Anglo-American Prestige Picture, never more emotionally tidy or stylistically turgid.

SHORT TAKE fragile and steely,

BOMBSHELL and Robbie, as an
“evangelical mil-
Director: Jay Roach lennial” employee,
Country/Distributor: is wide-eyed to
Canada/US, Lionsgate the point of unre-
Opened: December 20 ality. Filling out the
superb cast is John
shot that moves from a bucolic meadow Bombshell presents Lithgow as Ailes,
1917 into the endless, warren-like, increasingly
filthy trenches—is the fact that it has been
the spectacular
downfall of Roger
Mark Duplass as
Kelly’s husband,
BY N I C K P I N KE RTON designed as a single, nearly unbroken Ailes, chairman/ Connie Britton as
moving shot. The exception is a “black- CEO of Fox News, Ailes’s wife, and
Director: Sam Mendes out” that proceeds when one character is following a cascade Kate McKinnon as
Country/Distributor: UK/US, Universal Pictures knocked unconscious, though the camera of sexual harass- Jess, a lesbian pro-
Opened: December 25 is not fixed to the perspective of a single ment claims—a ducer at Fox and a
character and gambols off regularly on full year before the secret Hillary Clin-

S
am mendes’s 1917, which takes its own itinerary, whether to take in a Weinstein story ton supporter who
place amidst the carnage of World piece of atmosphere—clouds of flies over broke. Gretchen befriends Kayla.
War I, is dedicated to the memory of putrefied horseflesh or the eerie lights of
>ÀÃœ˜wi`> Deep at points
the director/co-writer’s paternal grand- a city ablaze by night—or to generate a complaint against but paper-thin at
father, Alfred Mendes, a veteran of the bit of suspense through selective conceal- Ailes in July 2016; œÌ…iÀÃ]̅iw“
Great War and later a writer of distinc- ment, as when it turns away at the crucial Megyn Kelly even- skips over questions
tually admitted that of complicity, and
1917: COURTESY OF UNIVERSAL PICTURES; BOMBSHELL: HILARY B GAYLE/LIONSGATE

tion. His film follows two enlisted English moment that a downed German aviator
soldiers, played by George MacKay and draws a deadly knife. she, too, had been pulls some of its
Dean-Charles Chapman, on a mission to Practically speaking, the technical harassed. Featuring punches, especially
deliver a message concerning a German accomplishment of 1917 would have Charlize Theron politically. But it’s
maneuver to a neighboring battalion that, been impossible 15 years ago. The rise as Kelly, Nicole still an engaging
if delivered on time, could potentially of digital cinematography has meant the Kidman as Carl- look at life behind
save hundreds of lives. It’s an homage to elimination of the time limits imposed son, and Margot the scenes of one of
the heroism shown by the elder Mendes, by the traditional film magazine, so Robbie as “Kayla” the weirdest work-
and who could possibly protest such a whereas Alfred Hitchcock had to find (a composite), places in existence,
filial gesture? ways to cover the magazine changes in his Bombshell, directed and what really
However faultless these ostensible one-take experiment, Rope (1948), Alex- by Jay Roach with comes across is the
motives for making 1917 may be, the ander Sokurov could shoot his Russian a screenplay by diseased “group-
experience of viewing the movie suggests Ark (2002) in one 96-minute Steadicam Charles Randolph think” of the culture
a very different story: Mendes watching meander through the Winter Palace (The Big Short), has at Fox. Crackling
the endurance-test ordeal of The Revenant in Russia’s Hermitage Museum. In an a nervous ripped- with potshots at
(2015) or the bravura single-take opening undertaking like 1917, with its multiple from-the-headlines Fox’s clown car of
of Gravity (2013) and thinking “I could do locations, intricate action sequences, and energy. on-air talent (Greta
something like that.” And with the aid of effects shots, engineering a true one-take Theron is excel- Van Susteren, Neil
cinematographer Roger Deakins, a squad- would be practically impossible, but here lent, but the choice Cavuto, Sean Han-
ron of craftsmen and technicians, and a postproduction innovations have come to use prosthetics, nity, Jeanine Pirro),
hundred million dollars, he has done it. to the rescue, allowing the filmmakers to rendering her Bombshell is most
The most noteworthy aesthetic gambit of suture together various long takes into a unrecognizable, is interesting when it
1917—evident from the opening, which seemingly seamless whole (as did Bi Gan L>vyˆ˜}°ˆ`“>˜ is most ambiguous.
follows a long walk-and-talk traveling in his Long Day’s Journey Into Night). is simultaneously —Sheila O’Malley

January-February 2020 | F ILM C OMM ENT | 7 1

In Karim Aïnouz's Invisible Life, piled-up misfortunes and the epic passage of time become shallow substi-
tutes for the characters' self-realization.

SHORT TAKE stern father, takes to

INVISIBLE LIFE the slums with her
child and surrogate
Director: mother, a prostitute
Karim Aïnouz named Filomena. A
Country/Distributor: bitter irony governs
Brazil/Germany, ̅iw“½ÃՏ̈“>Ìi
Amazon Studios tragedy: both sisters
Opened: remain in Rio believ- Certainly the most interesting aspect ity; and the lyric grace notes—a field of
December 20 ing the other is thriv- of 1917 is the resulting effect of anchoring cherry trees chopped down in blossom, an
ing in Europe. characters in environment, and provid- abandoned baby being nurtured in a base-
In 1951, two sisters Vivid production ing a sense of the sheer, awesome scale of ment in a bombed-out cityscape—strain
living in Rio de and costume design the war, as in early scenes that have our for a pathos that’s out of reach. A late-film
Janeiro fantasize in summon the vitality couriers skirting massive, muddy craters cameo by Benedict Cumberbatch gives
the haven of their of mid-century Rio. left by heavy ordinance. Technical brio, the game away: dig a millimeter beneath
shared bedroom: Shot by Alice Rohr- however, cannot redeem all that is callow the surface of the ubiquitous art-directed
good girl Eurídice wacher’s regular cine- and crass in Mendes’s movie: the dialogue grime of 1917 and you’ll catch the anti-
(Carol Duarte) dreams matographer, Hélène is pure placeholder stuffing, the approach septic smell of the Great Anglo-American
of becoming a pia- Louvart, the lush, a clumsy collision of the Assassin’s Creed Prestige Picture, never more emotionally
nist and attending sweltering environ- video games and Elem Klimov’s Come tidy or stylistically turgid.

INVISIBLE LIFE: © BRUNO MACHADO/SONY PICTURES; 1917: COURTESY OF UNIVERSAL PICTURES

the Vienna Conser- ment is heightened and See; the muck-daubed stars register
vatory, while fool- with dewy, bright as 21st-century theater kids who’ve been Nick Pinkerton is a regular contributor to
hardy Guida (Julia colors and rous- instructed to issue routine “Fucks” for Film Comment and a member of the New
Stockler) has love ing sound design. purposes of establishing “raw” authentic- York Film Critics Circle.
on the brain. Unbe- Impassioned perfor-
knownst to them, mances from Duarte,
these moments will Stockler, and Fer-
be their last together nanda Montenegro known better and left the room (and the
before the intrusions
of self-centered men
(as older Eurídice)
go hand-in-hand
The Assistant job) that very instant.” It’s the kind of
exploitative-but-not-illegal behavior that’s
keep them forever ܈̅̅iw“½ÃvՏ‡ BY DEVIKA GIRISH still fetishized as the trial by fire necessary
apart. blooded approach. to land a coveted spot in Hollywood—and
Following the But Aïnouz too read- Director: Kitty Green that turns underpaid, overworked, low-
disparate lives of ily buys into the trope Country/Distributor: USA, Bleecker Street level employees not just into victims but
two women over of female suffering, Opening: January 31 also enablers, forced into fearful silence.
the course of many which he views as In her harrowing new feature The

L
years, Karim Aïnouz’s inherently profound. ast october, a former assistant Assistant, Australian filmmaker Kitty Green
Invisible Life exam- As such, Eurídice to Harvey Weinstein named Rowena (Casting JonBenet) takes on the task of
ines how Brazil’s and Guida come to Chiu wrote an op-ed in The New York detailing the lives of these workers and the
«>ÌÀˆ>ÀV…ÞÃ̈yià Li`iw˜i`LÞ̅iˆÀ Times detailing her abuse and attempted webs of power and silence they’re often
desire and individual- longing. Piled-up rape at her boss’s hands two decades ago. caught in. Composited from hundreds of
ity. Eurídice falls into misfortunes and the One detail from her early career caught interviews that the director—whose prior
dreary domesticity epic passage of time my attention. During her first day on the filmography consists exclusively of doc-
after entering into become shallow job in 1998, she was asked to sit in front umentaries—conducted with women in
an arranged mar- substitutes for their of Weinstein at a screening. When she the industry, it’s a film of labored banality,
riage, and Guida, self-realization. moved slightly, he roared at her in rage. constructed to be as unspecific as its title
disowned by their —Beatrice Loayza Chiu wrote of the incident, “I should have and the name of its protagonist, Jane (Julia

7 2 | F I LM CO MM EN T | January-February 2020
 In taking us meticulously through the motions of a single day in the protagonist’s life, Kitty Green de-emphasizes
individual characters to foreground a workplace culture where monotony seems to have numbed moral instinct.

Garner), suggest. In taking us meticulously ing Matthew Macfadyen. Coming off

through the motions of a single day in an excellent turn as a corporate doofus
Jane’s life, Green de-emphasizes individ- on HBO’s Succession, Macfadyen teeters
ual characters to foreground a workplace eerily between warmth, feigned ignorance,
culture where monotony seems to have and menace, his threats couched in glib
numbed moral instinct. Even the unnamed reassurances and “career advice.” Much of
Weinstein stand-in is never seen in the film, what happens in The Assistant isn’t news for
only heard in irate, yelled commands. anyone familiar with these environments or
Jane’s day begins before sunrise. A coverage of Weinstein’s predatory ways, but
driver picks her up from her apartment this exchange, in its unnerving demonstra- SHORT TAKE ing them a radical
in Queens and drives her to a Manhattan tion of gaslighting, confronts us anew with LES MISÉRABLES visibility—and also
office, where she is the first to arrive. Her how deep and impenetrable the fortresses delaying the nar-
myriad thankless duties begin right away: of privilege and capital are. Director: Ladj Ly rative-propelling
emptying trash, making coffee, printing The Assistant bristles with tension Country/Distributor: action just a beat
scripts, arranging travel, and so on. Green in this one scene, its slow accretion of France, Amazon too long in the
films Jane with a close, locked-in camera, details building to a climax of sorts. But Studios process. After a
allowing the drudgery of her job to sink instead of escalating this glimpse into the Opening: January 10 pivotal altercation,
in while slowly capturing the indignities consequences of speaking up, the rest of however, the heat
The kids are not ratchets skyward to
all right in Ladj Ly’s a heart-stopping
Les Misérables. w˜ˆÃ…°
THE ASSISTANT: TY JOHNSON/COURTESY OF BLEECKER STREET; LES MISÉRABLES: SRAB FILMS/COURTESY OF AMAZON STUDIOS

The French direc- Ly’s scenes of

̜À½ÃwÀÃ̘>ÀÀ>̈Ûi revelry are brutally
feature takes as its interrupted by a
subject the lives of trio of local cops
several black and who are charged
brown children with making sure
clowning around in things stay below
Paris’s infamously a boil in Montfer-
destitute Montfer- meil. Stéphane
meil banlieues, a Ruiz (Damien
collection of alien, Bonnard), a green
sand-colored tow- transfer from the
ers ruled by bullish countryside, is new
«œˆViœvwViÀð to the intricate
and negotiations that accumulate in the the film relegates itself to depicting the Though the dynamics of the
background. The other two assistants, both agony of staying silent. Green’s film is an w“Li>ÀÃÌÀ>ViÃœv neighborhood and
young men, delegate menial tasks to Jane interesting test case for the kind of cine- Mathieu Kassovitz’s suspicious of the
and treat her with sexist condescension. She matic approaches possible for the #MeToo La Haine (1995) and cowboy antics of his
is repeatedly forced to deal with her boss’s movement, a subject that risks inviting Spike Lee’s Do the companions, who
enraged wife, who wants to know where sensationalism and voyeurism. With her Right Thing (1989), patrol the town like
he’s been. Then come the more sinister measured, unrelenting realism and focus Les Misérables they’re in an epi-
parts of her job: returning a stray earring, on systems of complicity rather than the shares more in spirit sode of Laramie—
found on the floor of her boss’s office, to crimes themselves, Green avoids those with Malik Chi- shooting (tear gas,
its distraught young owner; scrubbing his pitfalls, but her approach leaves no room bane’s Hexagone y>ŇL>˜}îvÀœ“
couch clean of mysterious stains. for displays of courage, let alone hope or (1994), shading the the hip. Ly brings
The Assistant unfolds for the most part change. Although affecting and even reve- lives of France’s the narrative to its
as a stoic, miserabilist drama, its implica- latory at points, The Assistant is ultimately working class logical conclusion,
tions etched in the controlled, brittle inflec- a drama of resignation. The choice it dra- with fresh dimen- which functions
tions of Garner’s face. As Jane, the actress matizes is a familiar one: we can all relate sions and beauty. less as a wake-up
moves through the spaces of the film with to the impulse to pick one’s livelihood and Between scenes of call than a somber
an almost apologetic air of self-effacement, career over challenging the rich and pow- harrowing violence, reminder that in
as if wishing to disappear into the office de- erful. But a more compelling and timely ޏˆ˜}iÀÃœ˜yiiÌ- one of France’s
cor. But a series of events involving a pretty, film might show us what it takes to make ing moments of hardest locales,
inexperienced new assistant proves to be the tougher call and risk losing it all—like pure, unadulterated things haven’t
too much, and Jane finally confronts the Rowena Chiu, her colleague Zelda Perkins, joy experienced by changed much.
company’s HR rep, played by a scene-steal- and many others have done. O the children, grant- —A. G. Sims

January-February 2020 | F IL M C OM MEN T | 73

 HOME
ODVD/+ DEBUT
OBLU-RAY/+ DEBUT
X STREAMING
X EXCLUSIVE TO VOD
MOVIES
Clockwise from top left: The Mandalorian, The Morning Show, Dickinson, The Computer Wore Tennis Shoes
The Great Flood
BY MIC H A EL K O RESK Y
XX Disney+, Apple TV+, and the streaming hustle
T
he proliferation of original streaming content
creates the illusion of choice, but what we have instead is—for
the most part—a new era of risk-free, market-tested products.
This won’t abate, especially with recent twin launches of Netflix’s
highest-profile challengers yet. Both services are so unbelievably extra
that they have pluses in their names: November 1 heralded the start
of Apple TV+, followed by Disney+ 11 days later. Disney reported 10
million sign-ups for their streaming service on the first day (accord-
ing to The Economist it hopes to break even by 2024, once it reaches
60 to 90 million subscribers); Apple TV+’s numbers are harder to
parse, since all customers with new Apple devices get the service
free for the first year—though it’s predicted to rack up 100 million
subscribers by the end of that year. Both companies hope that their
new shows and movies will become conversation-starters in the same
way that Netflix once managed with series such as House of Cards, or,
more recently, prestige cinema like ROMA and The Irishman.
Unfortunately, with this much content, the content itself starts
to feel beside the point. Most of the excitement around the launch
of Disney+ has pivoted on its release of the first streaming proper-
ty in the Star Wars franchise, The Mandalorian, which features an
appearance by something called Baby Yoda. But social media was also
transfixed by older Disney titles of variable quality being pulled out
of the vault, meaning that you can also, at long last, watch 1969’s The
Computer Wore Tennis Shoes—starring a young Kurt Russell, who’s at
7 4 | F I L M C O MME NT | January-February 2020
Cinema spun,
streamed, and
beamed
CLOCKWISE FROM TOP LEFT: COURTESY OF DISNEY+; COURTESY OF APPLE TV; COURTESY OF APPLE TV; DISNEY/KOBAL/SHUTTERSTOCK
least as cute as Baby Yoda—and 1985’s One Magic Christmas, in which
Harry Dean Stanton plays a Christmas angel who teaches harried
working mom Mary Steenburgen the true meaning of Christmas...
by killing off her entire family (it’s true). Of course, hand-drawn mas-
terpieces like Fantasia and Pinocchio are also part of the deal, which
makes somewhat palatable the prospect of the new live-action Lady
and the Tramp remake, an unnecessary reminder that the image of
“real” dogs eating spaghetti is actually kind of disgusting.
Apple+ has tried to get in on the conversation with a buffet
of new series, but all of the pilots I’ve seen seem as though they
were conceived during lunch break on Slack. In See, an attempt
at post-apocalyptic woodland mythmaking, slab-of-meat du jour
Jason Momoa wields heavy weapons and says things like, “This
is our home. We fight as one.” In Dickinson, an unimaginatively
irreverent, camped-up “you go, girl” version of the life of the New
England poet, featuring assistance from David Gordon Green,
Hailee Steinfeld smirks while receiving dialogue like “You are such
a weirdo!” In the prefab, exhaustingly ripped-from-the-headlines
The Morning Show, Jennifer Aniston, Reese Witherspoon, and Steve
Carell hand-wring over #MeToo mania in the most polished, dull,
evenly lit manner possible.
With HBO Max—which has Warner Bros., New Line Cinema, and
Studio Ghibli titles in its back pocket—breathing down their necks,
it’s doubtful that Disney and Apple will stop the content steamroll
anytime soon. But they’ll have to figure out a quality-over-quantity
solution to retain the viewers they need to make a profit.
In the 1933 pre-Code film The Story of Temple Drake, adapted from a controversial Faulkner novel, Stephen
Roberts’s direction is shimmeringly sensitive, using careful staging to suggest what cannot be shown.

++The Story of Temple Drake 20 DISCS

Stephen Roberts, 1933, USA; Criterion TO WATCH
in this 1933 pre-code film, adapted from a controversial ++Asako I & II Ryûsuke
Faulkner novel, Miriam Hopkins plays a socialite whose Prohi- Hamaguchi, Japan/France,
bition-era excesses land her first in a car accident, and then in 2018; Grasshopper Film
the clutches of a vicious gangster. “Trigger” (Jack La Rue) rapes ++Chained for Life Aaron
Temple, and then holds his shame-stricken victim hostage. In Schimberg, USA, 2018; Kino
a struggle, Temple shoots and kills Trigger, and she eventually Lorber
becomes embroiled in a court case to clear an innocent man of +Cobra Woman Robert Siod-
Trigger’s crimes. Tasked with maintaining the film’s coherence, mak, USA, 1944; Kino Lorber
Hopkins gives her all as Temple, who is torn between lightness +Crooklyn Spike Lee, USA,
and darkness. The direction by Stephen Roberts is shimmeringly 1994; Kino Lorber
sensitive, using careful staging to suggest what cannot be shown. ++Fail Safe Sidney Lumet,
The Story of Temple Drake emerges more as a fascinating object USA, 1964; Criterion
than a great film—luminous yet glum, impassioned yet stifled. ++Give Me Liberty Kirill
—teo bugbee Mikhanovsky, USA, 2019; Music
Box
+ Robert Todd: Interior Landscape +The Great McGinty Pres-
Robert Todd, 2005-2013, USA; Re:Voir ton Sturges, USA, 1940; Kino
Lorber
in the booklet for re:voir’s “Robert Todd: Interior Land- ++The Lighthouse Robert
scape” DVD, the filmmaker describes his 2005 film Evergreen as a Eggers, USA, 2019; Lionsgate
representation of “urban nature under siege”—a good summary ++The Mysterious Mr. M
for the late American artist’s approach to cinema. While only Lewis D. Collins & Vernon
occasionally laced with such anxiety, Todd’s exquisite 16mm Keays, USA, 1946; VCI
reveries frequently invoke a city/country dialectic rooted in phe- O +Old Joy Kelly Reichardt,
nomenology and the essence of lived experience. Throughout USA, 2006; Criterion
his prolific 25-year career, Todd traversed this divide through +One Missed Call Trilogy
unique aesthetic means. Each of the six films included in the Takashi Miike, Renpei Tsuka-
set—from Evergreen’s vivid depiction of encroaching industri- moto & Manabu Aso, Japan,
alization to the deft juxtaposition of public and private life in 2003-2006; Arrow
Habitat (achieved via intricate double exposures)—exemplifies ++Pain and Glory Pedro
the artist’s delicate sense of the natural world and the materiality Almodóvar, Spain, 2019; Sony
of the filmed image. Compiled and overseen by Todd himself ++Parasite Bong Joon Ho,
before his unexpected death in August 2018, the release has the South Korea, 2019; Universal
feel of both a gift and a testament.—jordan cronk O +Paris Is Burning Jennie
Livingston, USA, 1990; Crite-
+Stick rion
Burt Reynolds, 1985, USA; Kino Lorber +The Point Fred Wolf, USA,
1971; MVD
the bomb that effectively killed Burt Reynolds’s directing O +Room at the Top Jack
career, stick opens (like the credits of contemporaneous TV sen- Clayton, U.K., 1959; Kino
sation Miami Vice) with a sea-skimming aerial shot racing the Lorber
waves to the sandy shores of Miami Beach, and features Santería, ++What You Gonna Do
jai alai, gaudy high-rises, and a drug deal gone bad in the Ever- When the World’s on Fire?
glades. The picaresque plot about an ex-con, watered down from Roberto Minervini, Italy/USA/
Elmore Leonard’s novel, is driven by pulpy motivations—senti- France, 2018; KimStim
mentality and sadism. Reynolds is the sweetly sympathetic host O +Karel Zeman x 3 Journey
and emcee of a cartoonish cast highlighted by stunt performer to the Beginning of Time,
Dar Robinson as an albino button man in a black Stetson. It’s Czechoslovakia, 1955; Inven-
all just about enough to make you mourn the end of Burt’s run tion for Destruction, Czecho-
as a box-office alpha male auteur with a woolly New American slovakia, 1958; The Fabulous
Cinema regional accent.—mark asch Baron Munchausen, Czecho-
slovakia, 1962; Criterion

January-February 2020 | F IL M CO MM ENT | 75

Jennifer Reeder’s Knives and Skin deploys magical and macabre strategies to tell the story of a small town
wracked by the disappearance of a high school majorette.

20 TITLES +The Final Programme

TO STREAM Robert Fuest, 1973, UK; Shout! Factory

X 3 Faces Jafar Panahi, Iran, this cult 1973 riff on the postapocalyptic book by Michael
2018; Criterion Moorcock (who despised the movie) evokes the series The Aveng-
XX Atlantics Mati Diop, ers, which the director had worked on, with its flair for costuming,
France/Senegal/Belgium, cavalier dialogue, and sub-Bond follow-the-microfilm plotting. Jon
0GVƃKZ Finch, in Savile Row suits, plays a scientist whose also-scientist father
XX Burning Cane Phillip died and left a missing-piece secret wanted by another group of
;QWOCPU75#0GVƃKZ scientists—led by a lifeforce-vampiric mastermind played by Jenny
X Dawson City: Frozen Time Runacre—who are building an immortal messiah. If I tell you Ster-
Bill Morrison, USA, 2016; ling Hayden and Patrick Magee also appear, it’ll sound better than it
Ovid/Kanopy is—but there’s a comfort-food appeal to middling sci-fi, whereby we
XX Dolemite Is My Name pick through the imagined wreckage of its scenario more like kids in
Craig Brewer, USA, 2019; a playground than survivors of cataclysm. In fact there’s something
0GVƃKZ infantile about its impulsive staging, and the 2001-tweaking ending
X An Elephant Sitting Still (just before a psychedelic sex romp) resembles nothing so much as a
Hu Bo, China, 2018; various Mad magazine movie parody.—nicolas rapold
X Experimenter Michael
Almereyda, USA, 2015; Hulu X Knives and Skin
X Her Smell Alex Ross Perry, Jennifer Reeder, 2019, USA; Amazon
USA, 2018; HBO GO
X Honeyland Tamara over the past 10 years, Jennifer Reeder has established her
Kotevska & Ljubomir Stefanov, singular voice in short form, working and reworking her vision
Macedonia, 2019; various of teen turmoil and self-actualization in the suburbs, honing
XX In Fabric (Unrated) Peter new generic and aesthetic approaches for representing com-
Strickland, U.K., 2018; Amazon ing-of-age tropes. Knives and Skin deploys these magical and
XX The Irishman Martin macabre strategies to tell the story of a small town wracked by
5EQTUGUG75#0GVƃKZ the disappearance of a high school majorette named Carolyn.
X Journeys Through French In Reeder’s world, adolescents do not have a monopoly on
Cinema Bertrand Tavernier, crises of identity; in fact, adults flail as their teenage counter-
France, 2020; Cohen parts—awash in Reeder’s bright palette as they perform choral
X The Juniper Tree renditions of new wave hits—handle uncertainty with flair,
Nietzchka Keene, Iceland, owning their fear and their sadness and transforming it into
1990; Criterion something new.—nellie killian
X Knives Out Rian Johnson,
USA, 2019; Amazon
X The Limey Steven Soder- +  Christmas in July
bergh, USA, 1999; Lionsgate Preston Sturges, 1940, USA; Kino Lorber
XX Marriage Story Noah

CHRISTMAS I N JU LY: PARAMOUNT/K OBAL/S HUTTER STOC K

$CWODCEJ75#0GVƃKZ every time i watch Christmas in July, my heart is broken anew by
X The Portrait of a Lady the tenement couple played by Dick Powell and Ellen Drew. That
Jane Campion, U.K./USA, might sound strange for an antic, 67-minute Preston Sturges special
1996; Hulu about a young man (Powell’s Jimmy MacDonald) who enters a
X Razzia Nabil Ayouch, contest to coin the new slogan for Maxford House Coffee. The
France/Belgium/Morocco, heartbreak starts from the remarkably moody opening scene (Jim-
2017; Ovid my and Betty chatting and bickering on a rooftop after hours), con-
X Unfriended: Dark Web tinues through Jimmy getting pranked into thinking he’s won, and
Stephen Susco, USA/Russia, invariably takes me by surprise once again as Powell and Drew play
2018; HBO GO it all devastatingly earnest—because, quite literally, they aren’t in on
X The Way of the Gun the joke, nor are the other straight shooters in the movie. Shadow-
Christopher McQuarrie, USA, ing the conceit is the idea that the joke is on them, or anyone buying
2000; Hulu into the great American flimflam, which is embodied with hilarious
cynicism and bombast by Raymond Walburn as Maxford (along-
side his variously competent counterparts in business). Another
indelible portrait of us from Mr. Sturges.
—nicolas rapold

7 6 | F I LM C O MM EN T | January-February 2020
 Teorema packs multiple theses’ worth of themes and allusions into its 98-minute running time, but it’s also
a slyly seductive piece of entertainment: its dirty little secret is that it’s terrific fun.

Teorema (x 2)
WISH LIST
FOREIGN SKIES:
A Mighty Good Man WHAM! IN CHINA
When George Michael died in
BY MAI T LAN D MCDO NA GH 2016, I was gripped by a need
to revisit him at his absolute
++Teorema Pier Paolo Pasolini, Italy, 1968; there is no escaping Catholicism in Italy, as thick acme: as a golden-haired pop
The Criterion Collection with churches and shrines as a bramble bush is ambassador in Lindsay Ander-
with blood-drawing thorns. It’s embedded in the son’s Foreign Skies: Wham!

M
arxist poet/playwright/filmmaker
Pier Paolo Pasolini—who went through
life with épater le bourgeois all but tat-
tooed on his forehead—was a born provocateur
whose loathing of conventional social values
culminated in the brutally scathing Salò (1975).
His audacious Teorema (1968) is a mesmerizing
chronicle of transfiguration through sins of the
flesh, as members of a wealthy Milanese house-
hold—mother, father, son, daughter, and live-in
maid—are sequentially seduced by a nubile
stranger (the slim, vaguely androgynous Terence
Stamp) whose sensual attentions rip them loose
from their comfortable, conventional moorings.
Patriarch Paolo (Massimo Girotti) gives his
prosperous factory to his workers and eventually
strips himself bare and wanders into the dusty
wasteland. Sexually dissatisfied mother Lucia (the
brittlely beautiful Silvana Mangano) starts picking
up handsome young trade on street corners. Their
artistic—read: gay—son Pietro begins creating
TEORAMA: AETOS /K OBAL /S HUTTER STOC K
culture, and of course Pasolini had made The in China. Peppy, intimate, but
Gospel According to St. Matthew (1964). His quarrel never intrusive, Anderson’s 1986
was with the Church’s wealth amidst widespread documentary follows Michael
poverty, rather than the teachings of Christ. and bandmate Andrew Ridge-
Teorema packs multiple theses’ worth of ley on an especially auspicious
themes and allusions into its 98-minute running tour, when Wham! beat out
time, but it’s also a slyly seductive piece of Queen for the privilege of
entertainment: its dirty little secret is that it’s DGEQOKPIVJGƂTUV9GUVGTP
WHUUL¿FIun. English actor Stamp is the film’s secret group to perform in communist
weapon: a baby-faced beauty famously photo- China. Foreign Skies could
graphed by swinging-London chronicler David have been little more than a
Bailey, he appeared simultaneously innocent and casually orientalist trip behind
guilelessly depraved. He conformed to Pasolini’s “enemy lines,” but Anderson
evident fondness for slim, fair, lightly-muscled focuses on the border-dissolv-
youths, but Stamp could act rings around the ma- ing power of megahits like
jority of pretty boys of his era; his career outlasted “Young Guns (Go for It)” and
his looks by decades. the now-iconic, proto-Cantopop
Fifty years later, in addition to its vast influ- sax-fest “Careless Whisper.”
ence on generations of art cinema, Teorema is Between montages of Michael
a sly warning about false prophets and popular and Ridgeley ambling through
sensations. Pasolini was a doubting Thomas to the Tiananmen Square, or rubbing
elbows at a lawn party for for-

abstract drip paintings, and painfully shy daughter
Odetta withdraws into a cocoon of catatonia. The
family’s suicidal and largely ignored maid, Emilia,
returns to her home village and becomes an ascetic
who eats nettles and levitates above a rooftop,
which leads to her veneration as a holy woman.
Is Stamp’s nameless interloper, the agent of
their perverse liberation, a holy man—perhaps
even Jesus himself, as many have suggested—in
fetchingly tight trousers? Or is he an imp of the
perverse, all skim-milk skin and devilishly pale
blue eyes? Pasolini once declared himself an
atheist, but he was also Italian—and then as now,
core: he distrusted the media (of which he was, of
course, a part), loathed consumer culture, and had
little faith in the man on the street. He was gay but
rarely addressed homosexuality at any length in
his films; he was murdered by a hustler who ran
him over with his own car. But his ruthless dissec-
tion of the consequences of living a privileged and
unexamined life remains as pointedly ferocious as
it was half a century ago.
Maitland McDonagh is the author of four
books, including Broken Mirrors/Broken Minds:
The Dark Dreams of Dario Argento.
eign dignitaries, Anderson turns
the camera on Wham!’s grow-
ing Chinese fan base. “Now
[that] we have an open policy,
we have the chance to see this
type of program,” remarks one
concertgoer, sporting a jaunty
QNKXGFTCDƂUJGTOCPoUECRp9G
are so lucky.” Let the powers
that be return Foreign Skies to
its adoring public!
—Caroline Golum

January-February 2020 | F IL M CO MMEN T | 77

READINGS Books about all aspects of filmmaking and film culture

and other assorted scribblings, the book is less a typical anthology

of writings than a collection of often funny and tirelessly insight-
ful provocations to reconsider the ways we see, speak, write, and
make things. This isn’t writing about his art projects, but rather an
extension of them. In the 1988 essay “Dolomite: Having No Trust
in Readers,” Conrad uses language games, pastiche, and collage to
do with words what he’s done with film and music: wittily breaking
down, and then rejiggering, the form and content of the art essay.
Writings, edited by filmmaker and archivist Andrew Lampert
and writer Constance DeJong, is organized loosely by subject
(film, music, aesthetics, politics), with each section proceeding
chronologically. Like his moving-image and sound work, the texts
begin to flicker (so to speak) between the impenetrable and the
revelatory, but there is also a whole lot of art-historical gold here,
as well as direct explication of the theory and formidable tech-
nique behind the artist’s work. In a 1965 letter to Henry Romney,

TONY CONRAD (TOP): PHOTO BY SETH TISUE; LEILA TAYLOR (BOTTOM): PHOTO BY GREGG RICHARDS
then vice president of the Rockefeller Foundation (and resident
of the office from which Andy Warhol and Jonas Mekas shot the
eight-hour Empire), Conrad writes: “The Flicker, conceived as a
hallucinatory trip through unplumbed grottoes of pure sensory

Goodbye to Language disruption, naturally has turned into a (superficially) very static
flick, both aurally and visually . . . It seems that The Flicker may
A polymorphous genius explodes the codes be interesting primarily as a basic study in the effectiveness of a
whole range of operable visual harmonic relationships.” The letter
BY CLINTON KRUTE helps to locate Conrad’s work somewhere between the “static”
(and to Conrad, ultimately uninteresting) and the phantasmago-
Tony Conrad: Writings ria of Jack Smith, whose work he finds “intense and rich no matter
Edited by Constance DeJong and Andrew Lampert, how static some moonpool shot or other may become.”
Primary Information, $24 For all his formalism,

T
Conrad’s writing and art are
he late tony conrad’s work is characterized by never cold or removed, and
an endlessly imaginative interrogation of the forms of Writings consistently under-
communication by which we describe experience. From lines both the spiritual and the
the series of “Yellow Movies” (long-form “moving images” political motivations behind
comprised of taped-off rectangles of paint that yellowed over his work. As he makes clear
years) to the infamous structuralist film The Flicker (1966), to in the liner notes to his 1995
the epochal minimalist ”dream music” he created with La Monte album Slapping Pythagoras, by
Young, Marian Zazeela, and John Cale in the mid-1960s, Conrad questioning traditional notions
sought to strip languages of culture down to their basics and ma- of aural and visual harmony,
nipulate the irreducible complexity that was revealed. His work is Conrad sought to undermine
startling, playful, and almost always ahead of the curve. the antidemocratic regime that
That energy, sharply analytic mind, and dry wit are very much has governed aesthetics since
on display in Tony Conrad: Writings, a new selection of the artist’s the beginning of Western civ-
published and unpublished work from 1961 to 2012. (He died in ilization. Or at the very least,
2016.) Comprised of artist’s statements, reviews, articles, liner notes, slap it around a little. O

Darkly: Black History and
America’s Gothic Soul
By Leila Taylor, Repeater, $14.95
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7 8 | F I L M COM MEN T | January-February 2020
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Þi>Àð/…iÃiˆ˜VÕ`iBeloved,
 Unlike other five-borough portraitists (Scorsese, Allen, Spike Lee), Sidney Lumet refused to mythologize
his city, to underline its mysteries or romance for effect: his New Yorkers are cold, weary, and life-sized.

the Orient Express)—that he can’t be tethered to any one milieu.

Condemned, it would seem, for doing it all and doing it well,
Lumet is only now receiving his first major biography.
Spiegel, a Columbia professor, takes the lemons of having
to research a man who “left no diaries, no papers, no corre-
spondence, no archive,” and makes sweet lemonade out of the
warm and revealing oral histories she gathered by interviewing
his colleagues and family (including his daughter, screenwriter
Jenny Lumet, and all four of his wives). Since Lumet covered
the fine points of filmmaking in his own Making Movies, Spiegel
focuses on the themes of his films and the extraordinary ordi-
nariness of his characters. Unlike other five-borough portrait-
ists (Scorsese, Allen, Spike Lee), Lumet refused to mythologize
his city, to underline its mysteries or romance for effect: his
New Yorkers are cold, weary, and life-sized. But he was also, as
Spiegel demonstrates, a trailblazer: The Pawnbroker depicted
the Holocaust with then-radical candor, and Dog Day Afternoon
featured the first openly transsexual character in mainstream
American cinema, whom Lumet prevented from sinking into
stereotype by telling actor Chris Sarandon: “A little less Blanche

Streetwise Saint DuBois. A little more Queens housewife.”

Spiegel proves adept at explicating what the filmmaker
The versatile New Yorker put the truth gleaned from formative experiences like Yiddish theater (his
attention to the trappings of everyday people, evident in his
in plain sight | BY STEVEN MEARS
SIDNEY LUMET (TOP): WILL HART/YARI FILM GRP/KOBAL/SHUTTERSTOCK

occasional insistence that stars wear their own clothes); World

War II (an impression of the military as “a cauldron of brutality,
Sidney Lumet: A Life bigotry, and boneheadedness,” perhaps why his male cohorts are
By Maura Spiegel, St. Martin’s Press, $29.99 dens of thieves, not bands of brothers); and of course live TV,

K
ranging from Playhouse 90
nown in his time as “an actor’s director”—and to Cronkite’s You Are There
responsible for career-best performances from Katharine (a reverence for preparedness
Hepburn, Al Pacino, Paul Newman, Sean Connery, and and rehearsal). She laces her
William Holden—Sidney Lumet is now a patron saint prose with humor, opening her
of movie buffs. But just as terms like “buff ” point endearingly chapter on Lumet’s TV stint
backward, so is Lumet’s unfussy approach out of fashion with in the jargon and typeface of a
tastemakers obsessed with the artist’s signature. His exposure TV script. My favorite anecdote
of municipal corruption and misuse of the fourth estate unfair- reprints a sort of locker-room
ly groups him with the preachy coterie of “liberal conscience” pep talk that he gave his actors
directors—and as Maura Spiegel notes in her new reappraisal on the set of 12 Angry Men:
volume Sidney Lumet: A Life, he bore this stigma in “the 1980s “You are going to be the whole
and 1990s, when the L word was reviled by both the left and the picture . . . Just you and the
right.” Lumet’s a quintessential New York director, whose works fullness of your behavior. It’s
include Serpico and Dog Day Afternoon, but he was so prolific, right in your laps.” Lumet wise-
so protean—in the two years between those classics, he adapted ly understood that artists can’t
Larry McMurtry (Lovin’ Molly) and Agatha Christie (Murder on fly with clipped wings. O

Candyman, Get Out]̅iiÌÀœˆÌ‡
set It Follows>˜`Only Lovers Left
Alive, Night of the Living Dead,
>˜` ˆ՘˜½Ã>``ˆV̈œ˜Àœ“>˜Vi
Ganja & Hess.
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Ài>`ˆ˜}Darkly is Under the Skin,
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ۜˆ`]Vœ˜ÃՓˆ˜}i˜ÛˆÀœ˜Ã]>ˆi˜]
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Àœ“>˜ÌˆVˆÃ“>˜`̅i՘`iÀÞˆ˜}
v>ÃVˆ˜>̈œ˜Ãœv̅iº}œÌ…ˆVÜՏ]»
ÃÕV…>Ãvi>À]“œ˜ÃÌiÀÃ]…>՘̈˜}]
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>˜V…œÞ]>˜`̅i“>V>LÀi°
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œv̅iÃÌ>ˆ˜>˜`i}>VÞœvV…>̇
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ÃÕ«Ài“>VÞ­Ì…i>ÌÌiÀ>VÌÕ>ˆâi`
January-February 2020 | F I LM COMM ENT | 79
LÞ>LÕÃiÃœvºÃÌ>˜`ޜÕÀ}ÀœÕ˜`»
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̜ÀÞ°»pIna Diane Archer
GRAPHIC DETAIL The art of the movie poster by Adrian Curry
T HE BE ST REP ERTORY P OSTERS OF THE DECA DE
B
ookended by two very different posters for janus
releases of 1970s television series by R.W. Fassbinder—
World on a Wire and Eight Hours Don’t Make a Day—the
past decade has seen an explosion of revival key art fueled by
art prints and fan-created designs, as well as the popularity of
the 4K restoration and the milestone anniversary re-release.
The Fassbinder posters were designed and illustrated by two
different Sams: Smith and Hadley. Some of the most memora-
bly quirky and delightful rep work of the 2010s has come from
New Zealand–based Dylan Haley (Mutual Appreciation) for
8 0 | F I LM COM M ENT | January-February 2020
CLOCKWISE FROM TOP LEFT: JANUS FILMS; METROGRAPH PICTURES; ARBELOS FILMS; JANUS FILMS; PARK CIRCUS (X 2); GRASSHOPPER FILM
Arbelos and Kino Lorber, while Glasgow-based Jen Davies has
produced a decade’s worth of stylish quad posters—including
the above stunner for Playtime—for U.K. revival house Park
Circus (for which Brandon Schaefer also contributed the mar-
velous minimalist Kes artwork). Rounding out my favorites
are Scott Meola’s elegant monochrome for Straub-Huillet
(filmmakers you would otherwise rarely see represented by fan
art), and Midnight Marauder’s colorful resetting of the David
Hockney doc A Bigger Splash. O
Adrian Curry writes about movie posters for mubi.com and is
the design director for Zeitgeist Films and Kino Lorber.