DISPLAY UNTIL

DEC 31, 2019

PIETRO MARCELLO PEDRO COSTA

CAN/US $5.95

NADAV LAPID JESSICA SARAH RINLAND

KAZIK RADWANSKI NIKOLAUS GEYRHALTER
PM #0040048647
FILM & MEDIA ARTS
JRHWKHGHFDQDGDJHUPDQƱOP

Industry Breakfast,
*RHWKH)LOP7DON
& screening
“Why are we creative?“
GOETHE FILMS
@TIFF BHOO/LJKWER[ during #TIFF19
“Stronger Than Blood“ Sept 5-15, 2019
Oct 3 + 8 + 10, 2019
Thrillers by Arslan,
Yildirim, Kienle
European Union
)LOP)HVWLYDO
“Balloon“ by
30 Years Michael Herbig
)DOORIWKH:DOO @ The Royal Cinema
Gundermann Nov 9, 2019
by Andreas Dresen
with panel discussion
@ Paradise Cinema
Nov 28, 2019

@GoetheToronto
 N O

80
Interviews Columns
6 NO GOD BUT THE UNKNOWN 53 FESTIVALS
Pietro Marcello and Maurizio Braucci on Martin Eden Locarno
BY JORDAN CRONK BY JAMES LATTIMER

16 I SEE A DARKNESS 56 BOOKS

Pedro Costa on Vitalina Varela J. Hoberman’s Make My Day:
BY HADEN GUEST AND MARK PERANSON Movie Culture in the Age of Reagan
BY ADAM NAYMAN
36 NAKED IN PARIS
Nadav Lapid on Synonyms 59 BOOKS
BY ROBERT KOEHLER Chantal Akerman’s My Mother Laughs
BY PHOEBE CHEN

Features 62 TV OR NOT TV
Too Old to Die Young
13 NATURAL WONDERS BY CHRISTOPH HUBER
The Films of Jessica Sarah Rinland
BY DARREN HUGHES 65 GLOBAL DISCOVERIES ON DVD
BY JONATHAN ROSENBAUM
25 WOMAN ON THE VERGE OF A NERVOUS BREAKDOWN
Kazik Radwanski’s Anne at 13,000 ft 80 EXPLODED VIEW
BY JOSH CABRITA Peter Fonda’s Idaho Transfer
BY CHUCK STEPHENS
28 THE TASTE OF SUMMER
The Film Farm at 25
BY CAYLEY JAMES Currency
32 FOR A CINEMA OF BOMBARDMENT 70 FIRE WILL COME
BY MICHAEL SICINSKI BY AZADEH JAFARI

41 TOGETHER WE’RE WILLING TO TAKE ANY RISK 72 NO DATA PLAN

The Films of Han Ok-hee and Kaidu Club BY ERIKA BALSOM
BY JESSE CUMMING
74 THE TRAITOR
44 LAND AND SEA BY CELLULOID LIBERATION FRONT
Ogawa Shinsuke and Tsuchimoto Noriaki
BY CHRISTOPHER SMALL 76 LIGHT FROM LIGHT
BY LAWRENCE GARCIA
48 OCCUPATIONAL HAZARD
On Earth and Other Recent Films by Nikolaus Geyrhalter 78 MIDSOMMAR
BY JAY KUEHNER BY ANGELO MUREDDA

PHOTO CREDITS: Andergrau A24: 78, 79; Amazon Studios: 62, 63; Asia Culture Center: 41, 43; Athénée Français  Cultural Centre, Tokyo: 45; CFMDC: 28, 29, 31a, 31b; Daniel
Barnett: 32, 35; Grasshopper: 77; International Film Festival Rotterdam: 73; Kino Lorber: 2, 36, 39; Locarno Film Festival: 13, 15, 16, 19, 53, 55; The Match Factory: Cover, 6, 9, 11;
MDFF: 25, 26, 27; Mongrel Media: 74; Nikolaus Geyrhalter Filmproduktion: 48, 50; Pedro Costa: 21, 23; Phil Hoffman: 30; Pyramide: 71; The Song Cave: 59; Universal: 56; Zakka
Films: 44
 Congratulations to Pedro Costa’s
Vitalina Varela for
the Pardo d’oro 2019

Main partners Institutional partners Destination partner

Republic and Canton of Ticino with
Federal Office of Culture FOC
Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation SDC
City and Region of Locarno
EDITOR AND PUBLISHER
Editor’s Note
Mark Peranson

ART DIRECTION AND DESIGN

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No God
But the Unknown
Pietro Marcello and Maurizio Braucci on Martin Eden
BY JORDAN CRONK
“Of course it was beautiful; but there
was something more than beauty in it,
something more stingingly splendid
which had made beauty its handmaiden.”
—Jack London, Martin Eden
6
Pietro Marcello’s decade-long evolution from idiosyncratic film
essayist to grand narrative storyteller represents one of the most
significant artistic flowerings in contemporary cinema. Recently
unveiled in competition at Venice, the Italian filmmaker’s fifth
feature, Martin Eden, is momentous in ways that many Marcello
enthusiasts may not expect: distinctly big, dramatic, and affect-
ing, it confirms Marcello’s burgeoning talents and marks the be-
lated arrival of a singular artist to the international art-house
stage. More impressively, it does so without sacrificing the beauty,
rigour, and intelligence that has built Marcello’s reputation as one
of European cinema’s foremost fusionists. Indeed, one can draw a
mostly straight line from the director’s early archival shorts and
increasingly expansive hybrid features to the majestic storytell-
ing sweep of this, his most ambitious project to date.
Based on Jack London’s 1909 novel, Martin Eden finds Marcello
applying his wide range of art-historical reference points and
flair for archival materials to a story of vast sociopolitical res-
onance. Whereas the director’s two previous features, The
Mouth of the Wolf (2009) and Lost and Beautiful (2015), were
rooted in documentary—and, indeed, only took on their re-
spective narrative dimensions during the course of produc-
tion, via a fortuitous encounter with the wayward protagonist
of the former and the unexpected death of the latter’s original
subject—Martin Eden operates from a wholly fictional foun-
dation, albeit one reimagined to correspond with Marcello’s
long-standing interest in the plight of Italy’s proletariat.
To accomplish this, Marcello and his Lost and Beautiful co-
writer Maurizio Braucci—who is also a former collaborator of
Abel Ferrara (Pasolini, 2014) and Matteo Garrone (Gomorrah,
2008), as well as the recipient (along with Claudio Giavanessi
and Roberto Saviano) of a Silver Bear for Best Screenplay at
Berlin this year for Giavanessi’s Piranhas—have transposed
London’s novel from early 20th-century Oakland to Naples in
an unspecified moment in the decades surrounding WWI. In
doing so, they’ve shifted the socioeconomic elements of the orig-
inal story into a continuum of Italian modernism in which pol-
itics and aesthetics go hand in hand. Further, in freely adapting
London’s novel, Marcello and Braucci have fashioned the title
character into an emblem of the modern culture industry, whose
neoliberal particulars London predicted with startling clarity.
The film follows Martin (played with an extraordinary com-
bination of tenderness and ferocity by Luca Marinelli) from his
early days as a lowly, uneducated sailor, through his years as
a wide-eyed writer under the spell of bourgeois society, to his
later life as a celebrated but bitter artist living in posh isola-
tion. As in the novel, Martin’s journey begins serendipitously.
After a passionate night with a working-class woman named
Margherita (Denise Sardisco), he saves the son of a local aris-
tocrat from a beating at the hands of a dockworker. Arriving at
the family’s gilded estate, he’s introduced to the boy’s sister,
Elena (Jessica Cressy), a university student who begins to tutor
Martin and encourage his nascent writing talent. As the two de-
velop feelings for one another, Martin, sensing an opportunity
to raise his social and artistic standing, integrates himself into
Elena’s world of privilege and refinement, both to win the ap-
proval of her family and to earn respect as an aspiring author.
Although Martin’s upwardly mobile ethos stands in contrast to
London’s socialist ideology, the book is nonetheless a definitive
piece of auto-portraiture, coming as it did after nearly a dec-
ade of acclaim in which the author, still only 33 at the time, had
grown increasingly disillusioned with the trappings of fame and
its attendant pressures.
It’s in this tension between Martin’s individualism, shaped
through the evolutionary thought experiments of English po-
litical theorist Herbert Spencer, and the era’s wider socialist
values that Marcello’s film generates its power. Encouraged by
his troubled mentor Russ Brissenden (Carlo Cecchi) to add a so-
cialist element to his writing (“It might be the only thing that
will save you from the disappointment that’s approaching,” he
says prophetically), Martin instead takes the opposite tack: in
one of the film’s most memorable sequences, he and Brissenden
attend a labour protest, and Martin takes the stage to denounce
collectivism, calling the protestors a “society of slaves.” This
sentiment is echoed just a few scenes later, when Martin calls
out the hypocritical politics of Elena’s father and a group of his
well-bred liberal colleagues over dinner. Just as Martin begins
to make inroads as a writer (the story’s first half is punctuated
with multiple returned manuscripts that eventually result in
the publication of his debut novel, The Apostate), so too does his
disenchantment with his new surroundings begin to take a toll
on his sense of self. When his relationship with Elena inevitably
falters and Brissenden commits suicide, Martin, having since
rekindled his romance with Margherita, is left to reconcile his
beliefs with the belated recognition of his work by the very peo-
ple that prompted his exile.
Such class-conscious concerns are part and parcel of
Marcello’s cinema—one might recall the migrant workers trav-
elling through Italy by express train in Crossing the Line (2007),
or the unrequited romance between the two ex-cons at the cen-
tre of The Mouth of the Wolf—and if one of Martin Eden’s great
accomplishments is in how these preoccupations have been
translated into a more concrete narrative structure, it’s equally
impressive how Marcello has integrated his typical use of archi-
val material and expired celluloid stocks into the film’s larger
formal organization. Interspersed throughout Martin’s journey
is found footage of early-to-mid-century street life and labour,
images of ships, trains, and machinery reflecting an era of rapid
industrialization. Together with original 16mm footage shot by
cinematographers Alessandro Abate and Francesco Di Giacomo
and treated (through colour-tinting and other analog effects) by
Marcello for sequences that evoke memories of Martin’s child-
hood, the film creates a deceptively slippery temporal frame-
work that speaks to the director’s broad view of history and his
protagonist’s place in our collective view of the past. “No society
that ignores the law of evolution can last,” Martin declares dur-
ing his speech to the group of incensed strikers; of course, the
same might be said of artists and filmmakers, and with the un-
expected scope and audacity of his latest Marcello proves that
he has no intention of resting on his laurels.
Cinema Scope: Pietro, it was you who suggested that we do
this interview with Maurizio, and I’m glad that you did, as it
seems to me that this film, probably more so than any of your
others, really took shape through the writing process. Can you
tell me about how you and Maurizio came to know each other,
how your collaboration first started, and how that’s continued
through Lost and Beautiful and now Martin Eden?
Pietro Marcello: Maurizio and I have known each other for
20 years. We have an age difference of ten years but we have
shared many political and social experiences. We have worked
together quite often, and Jack London’s novel was a gift that
Maurizio gave me 20 years ago, so it was right for us to work to-
gether on this very free adaptation of Martin Eden. We are also
both producers of the film through our company Avventurosa,
7
which allowed us to make this very free transposition of the
novel for cinema. Our Martin Eden is more of a Mediterranean
character, and the situation is deeply rooted in Europe and in
European culture and not in the American one of San Francisco
in the beginning of the 20th century, as was London’s. I felt the
need to make this film after 20 years, and it was beautiful and
important to work on it with Maurizio. I feel it’s a necessary film
for the way it resonates with our contemporary times.
Scope: Maurizio, how did you become familiar with the nov-
el? Do you remember when you first read it and when you gave
it to Pietro?  I do believe that all of my films are in  Martin Eden:  Crossing
Maurizio Braucci:  Yes, I remember because when I gave it
to Pietro I said to him, “That’s our story.” Because it’s a story
of people who discover culture—the power of culture—during
their lives: through meeting people, masters, friends, books...
It’s not an education that we received in an ordinary way, but
one from all around our city, all around the world, all around
our lives. In each case we were establishing references for our
own improvement and our own teaching.
Scope: How did this cultural education relate to your formal
education?
Braucci:  We both received an ordinary education but, as
Pietro mentioned, we’ve since been applying our politics in var-
ious social circles, so that was a big experience for us, just see-
ing how the world works. The difference between us and other
friends is that we have been more engaged in reality. London’s
book kind of represents, more than maybe any other, ourselves.
Scope: What is it about the novel that made you two think
that it would be worth transposing to an Italian setting, and to a
somewhat more modern time period?
Marcello: Our Martin is more modern, indeed. He is the
20th century. But to me, he’s like Hamlet or Faust: he’s just a
young boy that somehow ends up betraying the peace and the
social class he belongs to. And we can’t even speak of a class
conflict here: he’s just an archetype. At least, to me, it was obvi-
ous that he’s an archetype. He’s a negative hero. And he was for
Jack London as well. He used to say that each of us has our own
Martin Eden. It is indeed the story of emancipation, but in a way
Martin Eden is a victim of the culture industry. And in that way
it’s a very political film.
Scope: What was the adaptation process like? Did you two sit
down and work on the script together, or was it done remotely?
Marcello: I come from documentary, so my process of writ-
ing is not in the typical Anglo-Saxon tradition of a very struc-
tured screenplay. The writing is necessarily incomplete, and I
believe in the opportunity and in the fact that you need to be-
tray the writing at a certain point. To be more concrete, we did
the transposition of the novel together, and Maurizio did the
découpage. We worked together in changing the literary lan-
guage to a cinematic one, doing our homework. On one side we
felt very free with our choices, but at the same time we were very
close to the novel. We also adopted the Rossellini method be-
cause, in writing the screenplay, we left room for the unexpect-
ed moments that we knew could occur during the shoot. It was a
very experimental process for us. We worked together in a home
8
in the countryside. We can’t really work in a digital form like
Skype. We said, “We need to meet other people,” and we asked
for advice and special consultancy, especially for the historical,
political, and even literary references in the film.
Scope: Pietro, your films seem to have taken on more and
more of a narrative form over the years. Has that been a con-
scious decision on your part?
Marcello: I believe that documentary-making is a tool, the
essential tool in training filmmakers, because you learn to deal
with the kind of unexpected things that we just mentioned. And
the Line,  The Mouth of the Wolf,  The Silence of Pelesjan  (2011),
and  Lost and Beautiful. It somehow sums up everything I’ve
done so far, and is not new, in my view. I feel I’ve used the same
cinematic tools, but I’m not in the right position to judge my
own work. It is difficult for me to see, but I strongly believe
that  Martin Eden  sums up everything I’ve done. As far as I’m
concerned, I would like to continue making films as a transposi-
tion of reality, because filmmaking is a transposition of reality.
And of course, with my film, you’ve seen just one Martin Eden.
I mean, I had to end it in a certain way, but there could be many
different versions of the story because it is so rich in archival
material and in history. In all of this, Luca Marinelli has been
the factor that allowed me to cross into this realm.
Scope: Would you say that your process has changed at all
with this film, as far as shooting or mounting a slightly bigger
production?
Marcello: In the past I’ve worked with very little money, but
I feel I used the same method in filmmaking, although, being
the producer of the film, I had to control much more than I’ve
had to in the past. I do believe that this is the system of film-
making that should be reformed, so to speak, because it is not a
matter of the number of people that work on a film, but the qual-
ity of the people that counts. My ideal crew is this sort of small
fleet, because I like to control all the machinery. I like to also
be the cinematographer, and to use film stock, though I am not
against digital. I like the craftsmanship of filmmaking. When I
shoot a film I am fascinated by chance, by the unpredictable, the
kind of alchemy that allows you to change the story, the scene,
the time.
Scope: Did you use a lot of the same crew as you had on your
past films?
Marcello: I worked with the usual collaborators and, of
course, there were some new people in the crew, some of whom
I worked with better than others. To me, it was really a sort of
fire christening in a way, because I really felt I pushed the en-
velope for this project. And being a producer, I had to learn this
aspect as well, and I did make mistakes in terms of wrongly as-
suming things because it was such a big project. A filmmaker,
I think, should focus on making the film, and not be so much
concerned with production. But I do believe this was a valiant
and rich experience and, thanks to the mistakes I made, I grew
up. I hope that with the next film I’ll just be the director. But
if a producer chooses to work with me there will hopefully be
an added value because I learned all the aspects of executive
production, and I now know very well how to spend money in
the right way.
Scope: Did you have to work as a producer simply to get the
film made?
Marcello: It was such an important production, a big produc-
tion, and such a complex one that I felt that I needed to control
the whole process, including the executive production. It was a
challenge: we had to try and control all the different stages in
order to be able to give ourselves the opportunity of doing what
we wanted to do. But I also don’t believe that filmmaking is the
seventh art—there’s still a long way to go.
Scope: Can you two talk about the decision to update the sto-
ry to an unspecified era in Italian history? Why leave the exact
period unclear?
Braucci:  It’s a very classic novel from the 20th century, and
most people that read it when they were young remember it as
a melodrama of the poor writer that wants to become famous.
When you reread it, you realize that Jack London has dealt with
very important issues for the last century: the creation, or the
birth of the culture industry that then paved the way for the mass
culture, and the conflicting relationship between individuals
that collectively branched out into capitalism’s exasperation and
communism’s annihilation of the individual—and, of course,
the only correct vision made by anarchism, in a special way by
the Italian revolutionary Errico Malatesta. So while it’s  a piv-
otal novel of the 20th century, it also deals with very important
contemporary issues as well. And while these issues occurred
slightly later in Italy, they were shared in all countries belong-
ing to the Western world. The effort was thus made to adapt the
novel to European culture and to Italian culture in particular.
This is where we had to do a lot of research and enlist the help
of many experts and consultants. For instance, in Italy we com-
pletely lack maritime literature in the tradition of Moby-Dick or
Joseph Conrad, but we discovered that there is a very rich liter-
ature that has to do with farming traditions. On the other side,
we switched the Swinburne Anglo-Saxon reference to the French
poet Baudelaire, because he was more important in Italian
culture. We had to find a series of equivalents like this, while
translating the greatness and the richness of the novel itself.
Marcello: We must also not forget that Martin Eden is to Jack
London as The Picture of Dorian Gray is to Oscar Wilde. We are
talking about two novels that are self-portraits of the authors.
That is to say that any reference to Martin Eden is a reference
to Jack London, but in a more negative light. It’s like a mirror in
a way. It is the anti-hero they are portraying—not references to
us, but to themselves. And that tells something that is true for
all times: that you can have the most beautiful and noble goals
in life, but you can get lost along the way and end up in a com-
pletely different situation.
Scope: Because of this, was it difficult to treat the material in
a personal manner?
Marcello: The freedom that we took in this adaptation was
not just in making all these aspects, even the autobiographical
aspects of Jack London, more contemporary in terms of setting,
but also in terms of the portrait of Martin Eden himself, of him
looking for and trying to conquer success, and finding himself
engulfed in a total state of confusion—thoughts of wanting to
die because he is dead inside. And then of course there’s the
metaphor of crossing the sea, and crossing time, and history.
But the soul is lost. Martin Eden’s soul is lost before his body. 
Braucci:  During our research, we found out that there
was a communist Neapolitan revolutionary whose name was
9
Edmondo Peluso who befriended Jack London and went to live
in San Francisco with him and shared political fights in the
name of socialism. He also wrote and published articles about
London, but these were critical at a certain point of the figure
of the novelist. He blamed London for chasing after the sort of
novelist fame. He wanted to become a star in the world of liter-
ature, and so the paradox is that it was an intimate and critical
gaze on Jack London that somehow mirrored the one that Jack
London had on Martin Eden and on himself. Peluso died later,
in 1938, in a gulag in Siberia, a victim of Stalinism and, in some
way, the socialist battle whose loss he had been critical of with
regards to Jack London’s books. So in some ways this is a mirror,
or embodiment, of the themes and contradictions of all of the
uses that crisscross the 20th century and that are also present
in the novel, in the protagonist, and in the author.
Scope: Tell me about the pairing of Luca Marinelli and Carlo
Cecchi in the two main male roles.
Marcello: I immediately thought about Luca and Carlo. They
have worked together in the past, and it’s probably safe to say
that Carlo Cecchi has been the mentor of Luca Marinelli, es-
pecially on stage. Carlo is more experienced and better known
as a stage actor than he is in filmmaking. The film really stands
on Luca’s shoulders, and I knew he would be able to shoulder
the whole production. I felt his ability and skills as an actor
would serve him well throughout the film, despite the chang-
es of level and register that are present. In the case of Carlo, I
didn’t even do a screen test. He was so brilliant and so helpful
during the shoot. It was really a moment of deep sharing and
epiphany, with both Carlo and Luca. They both stayed with us
for a long, long time, from beginning to end. Also, allow me to
add that for the two girls, Elena and Margherita, I wanted to
find actresses that are almost unknown, because I wanted them
to be fresh onscreen. And I found that in Jessica Cressy and
Denise Sardisco.
Scope: Pietro, can you tell me a little about the archival foot-
age that we see in the film? I’m curious where it came from, but
10
also about some of the passages that seem to be composed of
original footage  that you made to look archival, for those mo-
ments meant to evoke Martin’s past.
Marcello: Yes, that’s correct. There is a lot of archival foot-
age and also sequences and shots from my previous films,
things that I shot by myself. As for the archival research, that
was very thorough. It was thanks to Alessia Petitto, who dealt
with this. The film opens with Errico Malatesta. He comes from
Santa Maria Capua Vetere. He was an anarchist and a reference
for the 1st of May and that specific historical moment, Savona
1921. Then it’s true that whenever we switch to the footage that
I shot, these are moments of youth—they’re all images meant
to service the film. It’s Martin’s own memory, of course. They
shed light on the character and on the film. It’s a kind of coun-
terpoint, or juxtaposition.
Scope: Where did the idea come from to switch perspectives
like this?
Marcello: It’s something that I’ve done in my previous films.
I’ve always used this kind of juxtaposition. It allows me to com-
plete the portrayal of Martin Eden on one side with his account
of his past and his story when he was a child, but also to give a
portrait of the society of the time through those images. I have
always used film archives, they are often indispensable for me,
and I am fascinated by their irreproducibility. I believe that in
Martin Eden the archives represent the vector of history into
the film. It was also useful for me to tell the story in terms of
editing. The editing is complex, it has different levels, and it
was for this reason that I chose for the first time to use two ed-
itors, Aline Herve and Fabrizio Federico, with whom I shared
the most adrenaline-filled part of the film—which for me is
the editing!
Scope: How many formats did you shoot on?
Marcello: Well, the final format is 1:66, the uniform format.
Most of the film is shot on 16mm or Super 16mm. Then I used
a soft Cooke lens. We also coloured some archival footage be-
cause it was necessary to uniform the hues and the texture of
the image itself. There are images in 35mm, such as footage of
the ship you see early on, which is very beautiful and worked as
a metaphor for what is happening in the character’s life. We also
used some expired film stock. So many different formats that we
then uniformed in the final editing. It’s a craftsman’s work, in
a way.
Scope: After the book came out, Jack London remarked that
no one realized that the book was a critique of individualism.
I’m curious what each of you make of that statement?
Marcello: It’s a complex issue, and our position is explicit in
the initial footage of Malatesta. He was an anarchist and be-
lieved that persons, individuals, people, are not to be neglected,
but at the same time are not to become megalomaniac. And if
you think about Jack London, his skills, his ability to see very
far, he was almost clairvoyant, because for him, in 1909, the
two big tragedies of the 20th century—totalitarianism on one
side, with Stalinism and Nazism, and neoliberalism, which is
of course a result of individualism, on the other—hadn’t even
occurred yet. He is extremely contemporary and topical. We
are still living all of this nowadays. In the research that we
carried out for the film we also came to see, for example, the
importance of the thought and writings of the recently de-
ceased Agnes Heller, the Hungarian philosopher, who tried
to reconcile Marxism with the idea of a person, of an individ-
ual. That’s a very urgent and topical contemporary theme, you
know? The importance of raising and educating healthy indi-
viduals, and allowing them freedom of expression, but prevent-
ing them from excess, in a way. In that sense, Martin Eden is a
masterpiece, a seminal work, especially considering when it
was written.
Braucci: Jack London is really a very complex figure. On one
side he’s known as a socialist writer, but he was also attend-
ing the bohemian circle of George Sterling and experiment-
ing with drugs, with dreamlike journeys, and somehow he
professed a kind of secular mysticism. He’s also the author of
Social Darwinism in direct connection with Marx. And anoth-
er connection is with Herbert Spencer, who was not only Jack
London’s mentor but also Martin Eden’s mentor. What Jack
London’s trying to do with his work is, yes, depict very impor-
tant elements of culture and history, but also remind us that we
must be careful not to allow those elements to turn us into nihil-
istic fanatics. Everything must be always meditated upon and
adapted to different situations. To go back to Hebert Spencer,
just to give you an example of the research that we carried out,
and of the difficulties in trying to depict this fresco of the time
of Martin Eden and Jack London, Spencer is a philosopher who’s
almost neglected and forgotten in Italy, if not hated—he is con-
sidered a neocon mentor; we found just one professor who knew
much about him. He’s considered to be the prophet of evil and,
of course, the main negative reference for neoliberalism in Italy,
although he’s still very much studied abroad and in the Anglo-
Saxon world.
Scope: Pietro, I’ve been told that Jean-Pierre Mocky, who
died just the other day, is a big influence on you. I don’t know if
he had any influence on this film, per se, but can you talk about
how he may have inspired you philosophically?
Marcello: I can  say that he’s someone that had the courage
of speaking his mind and the courage to explore the possibili-
ties of cinema as a political tool. He’s someone I’ve deeply ad-
mired and my sadness is that I wish I could have met him and
interviewed him, because I never had the opportunity to. What
fascinated me the most about him was his ideas about the possi-
bilities of making films, and his idea of what a film crew is. And
he’s been everything: a director, an actor, a producer. I admire
him for going on television and defaming filmmaking and the
industry of film. The political structure that his ideas forged
and the culture industry in general were the same subjects and
issues of Martin Eden and Jack London. I’m quite impressed by
your question on Mocky, because he is really the example and
embodiment of the possibilities of making political cinema. He
was a free voice, a free thinker. Unfortunately there are fewer
and fewer nowadays.
11

Natural Wonders
In Jessica Sarah Rinland’s 2016 short The Flight of an Ostrich
(Schools Interior), a shy, studious eight-year-old becomes trans-
fixed by a nature documentary while her more rambunctious
classmates whisper and pass notes around her. “The ostrich is in-
capable of doing the one thing birds are famous for: they cannot
fly,” the documentary’s narrator intones with BBC-inflected au-
thority. Rinland registers the young girl’s enthusiasm in extreme
close-ups, first focusing on her eyes and then the corner of her
mouth, suggesting a secret smile. The other kids are all framed
in wider shots, bored and antsy like the schoolboys in Le quatre
cents coups (1959). When discussion turns to the ostrich’s defence
mechanisms—its uncommon speed, strength, stride, and agility—
Rinland cuts to a close-up of the girl’s ear, underlining the mes-
sage of the film: “If you’re a bird that can’t fly, you have to find oth-
er ways of surviving.” The girl picks up a note from the floor, folds
it into an airplane, stands, and tosses it towards a window while
everyone around her looks on in silence. It’s a small but significant
moment of self-actualization.
In most respects, The Flight of an Ostrich (Schools Interior)
is an outlier among the 20 films Rinland has made since 2008.
Those That, at a Distance, Resemble Another
The Films of Jessica Sarah Rinland
BY DARREN HUGHES
Commissioned by Channel 4’s short-film program Random Acts,
it’s a crowd-pleasing, inspirational, on-the-nose story told effec-
tively and efficiently in just under four minutes. Still, Ostrich is a
useful point of entry into Rinland’s practice because it express-
es so matter-of-factly many of her preoccupations and stylistic
habits: playfully poking at traditional documentary tropes; mix-
ing classical narrative montage and scripted performances with
more experimental strategies; collecting visual material with the
curiosity of an archivist (the ostrich footage, which Rinland shot
herself in Esteros del Iberá in Argentina, is used in a previous
film as well); and precisely modulating the affective experience of
viewers, primarily through her dedication to 16mm film and her
reliance on formal techniques that verge on ASMR. More simply,
the young girl in Ostrich is a convenient personification of the au-
thorial voice that guides much of Rinland’s work, which is full of
wonder and open to epiphany.
Raised in the UK by Argentinian parents, Rinland had her own
epiphanic encounter with a film while studying painting and pho-
tography at Central Saint Martins, University of the Arts London.
As part of a class assignment, she wandered into a screening of
13
Heimat Is a Space in Time
Jonas Mekas’ Walden (1968) at the Tate, and was struck by how
it evoked the same sensations she had experienced as a child
when she would compulsively rewatch her family’s home vid-
eos. In particular, she was mesmerized by Mekas’ narrated
commentary and by her discovery of the meaning-making ten-
sion that can exist between layers of image and sound. “There’s
something very interesting about the authority of that voice
‘above’ the image,” Rinland told José Sarmiento Hinojosa in
a 2018 interview for desistfilm. “For me it’s more interesting
when the image and voice are separate and perhaps sometimes
they coincide. The separation allows viewers to escape into
their own imagination.”
The influence of Walden is easy enough to spot in Rinland’s
earliest 16mm exercises—literally so in Bosque (2008) and To
Rock and to Cease (2008), which were both shot at Black Pond,
south of London. The Laughing Man (2008) is a silent portrait;
Fog (2008) is an experiment with in-camera effects, includ-
ing double exposures. In Darse Cuenta (2008), Rinland recites
Jorge Bucay’s poem of the same name over obscure images that
have been processed into low-contrast, periwinkle abstraction.
The poem, which Rinland delivers in an intimate whisper, tells
the story of a person who, after falling into the same hole nine
days in a row, realizes on the tenth “that it is more comfortable
walking on the other side of the road.” As the narrator arrives
at this new consciousness, Rinland cuts to a wider perspec-
tive and the image snaps into focus, revealing a sun-soaked
window frame.
At the risk of oversimplification, Rinland’s mature films have
tended to fall into one of three general modes. Darse Cuenta
and Ostrich belong in the first, which might be classified as fairy
tales of a sort. In Nulepsy (2010), an elderly man recounts how
his life has been affected by a rare pathological condition that
compels him to stand motionless and nude. (In flashback scenes,
he’s portrayed by a curly-haired actor whose resemblance to
Michelangelo’s David is surely no coincidence). In Not as Old as
the Trees (2014), another aged narrator describes the joy of watch-
ing the world go by from the vantage of treetops. Both films have
some of the superficial markings of televised re-enactments, as if
we are watching one of those “strange-but-true” cable series, but
Rinland’s image-making—particularly her blocking of people in
the middle of the frame for static portraits—combined with the
childlike sensibility of her scripted voiceovers lend the films an
abiding sense of awe and attunes viewers to presence. A sequence
of portraits at the end of Not as Old as the Trees is like a lesson in
mindfulness, guiding viewers to experience life as the old man
does, with curiosity and compassion.
Rinland’s “sensibility,” her “authorial voice”—these are
ham-fisted attempts to describe what might more plainly be
called her “taste,” that fickle quality in every talented artist
that resists simple classification. In the best of the fairy-tale
films, Adeline for Leaves (2014), a botanist who is nearing the
end of his life awakens with a vision of a blue flower, signifying,
as he says in voiceover, “a metaphysical striving for the infinite
and unreachable.” The task of cultivating the flower is be-
queathed to Adeline, a young prodigy who toils away silently in
14
her garden. Rinland opens the film with a lovely montage of ba-
nana plants and palm fronds before introducing Adeline, posed
among the flora in a still, planimetric composition as rich in
detail as anything in a Wes Anderson movie. Rinland achieves
a kind of twilight rapture in the rhythm of her cutting, occa-
sionally pausing on an especially beautiful image for the sheer
pleasure of it—I’m thinking particularly of a 20-second shot of
Adeline looking out of a car window, the natural light shifting
in shadows on her face, her hair blowing in the breeze.
In 2011, Rinland happened upon the site of a stranded sperm
whale and struck up a conversation with the veterinarian who
was performing a necropsy. That chance encounter set her
off into the second major phase of her career: a series of films,
installations, performances, and a book, completed over five
years, that investigate the social and economic histories of
whaling. The project also fed her interest in institutions such
as museums, laboratories, and historical societies that have
grown up around the study and preservation of animals and
artifacts. A Boiled Skeleton (2015) documents the basement fa-
cility at University College London’s Grant Museum, where the
160-year-old remains of a bottlenose whale are stored away in
boxes and bubble wrap. Necropsy of a Harbour Porpoise (Seeing
From our Eyes into Theirs) (2015) appropriates Stan Brakhage’s
objective perspective on the physical remains of a life by film-
ing an everyday dissection. We Account the Whale Immortal
(2016), a collaboration with Philip Hoare and Edward Sugden,
is a multi-screen installation that revisits the stories of three
whales that found their way into the Thames.
The first of the whale films, Electric Oil (2012), is a transition-
al piece, with another young heroine at its centre: six-year-old
Laura Jernegan, who in 1868 set off with her family on a three-
year whaling expedition and documented their adventure in
a journal that now resides in the Martha’s Vineyard Museum.
In large block lettering, she sketched daily accounts of the
grisly “cutting-in” processes that took place up on deck—“they
smell dredfully [sic]...the whale’s head made twenty barrels of
oil”—which Rinland then spins into a fiction: Jernegan, now
an adult, has become plagued by a mysterious allergy (a vari-
ant of “nulepsy”) as a manifestation of her repressed trauma.
The final minute of Electric Oil cuts rapidly between close-ups
of Jernegan tugging at her sweater and found footage of whales
racing alongside a hunting boat. As Jernegan strips off her shirt,
a harpoon finds its target and a dying whale tips forward, its tail
bobbing lifelessly on the surface.
The found material in Electric Oil also appears in the short
sketch Description of a Struggle (2013) and again in The Blind
Labourer (2016), an ambitious essay film that draws parallels
between the industrial practices of whaling and logging. When
we first see the whalers in Electric Oil, the mid-century footage
is intercut with a clinical note written by Jernegan’s fictional
physiologist: “Laura’s first memory of this sensation was at sea.
She vividly recalled two men, up to their knees in the blubber of
a humpback whale, squeezing out the oil.” In that context, the
images are charged with a certain eroticism, as they are filtered
through the competing subjectivities of both a young girl living

in a world of men, and the anxious woman she will become. In
The Blind Labourer, the exact same footage is rendered inert:
the whalers, like the loggers, are little more than cogs in a grue-
some machine.
Rinland is rare among contemporary moving-image artists
in that she is more naturally a scenarist and writer than a con-
ceptualist. Her frequent use of voiceover narration generates
the polyphony she admired in Walden, but it’s also a literary
device that gives her license to craft characters and story arcs,
and to play with language itself. (James N. Kienitz Wilkins is
a peer in this respect.) It wouldn’t be quite accurate to suggest
Rinland is leaving behind those tendencies—the absurd and
genuinely funny voiceover in Ý Berá – Aguas de Luz (2016) de-
scribes fish that swim backwards to keep water out of their eyes
and a one-winged bird that can fly in only one direction—but
the most recent phase of her work does represent a significant
shift in style. Most striking is a new penchant for disembod-
ying her human subjects by shooting their behaviour almost
exclusively in close-ups. This strategy is the foundation of
Expression of the Sightless (2016), in which a blind man runs his
hands over John Gibson’s statue Hylas Surprised by the Naiade
and describes what he “sees.” Likewise, in Black Pond (2018),
Rinland seldom pulls back to a wide shot of her collaborators
from a natural history society in the south of England, instead
focusing on the practiced work of their hands as they tend to
bats and measure trees.
A key to Rinland’s newest film, Those That, at a Distance,
Resemble Another, can be found in the closing credits: along
with cinematography, editing, and foley, Rinland is credited
as “Voice” and “Pink-Nailed Ceramicist” (the nail designer is
also credited). When we first see her hands they’re covered in
cracked, grey ceramic slip, like gloves. Rinland then cuts to
still photos of an elephant’s grey, cracked face, followed by a
high-angle shot of Rinland’s clean hands as she vacuums dust
from a 3D printer, gradually revealing one section of what will,
over the course of the film, become a museum-quality replica
of a century-old tusk. I say “century-old” because, as Rinland
vacuums, she explains that the original was donated to the mu-
Those That, at a Distance, Resemble Another
seum in 1900 and came from an elephant that was poached in
Malawi. Because she is not identified onscreen as the speaker,
and because the form of the film constantly calls attention to
the process of its own making—for example, Rinland claps for
sound before the vacuum shot and bridges scenes that take
place in interior locations with processed sounds of insects
and fauna—we must take on faith the validity of every claim.
Rinland, the screenwriter, remains in control.
Those That, at a Distance, Resemble Another ends with one
more replica for us to consider: a 3D-rendered animation of
the tusk. How does it compare to the original? To the ceramic
piece? How should we judge the value of each? Rinland is beg-
ging the classic ontological questions of art, but that line of
interpretation is something of a red herring. Rather, the film
seems designed to ensnare viewers in the unspoken fetishistic
pleasures of collecting, archiving, and displaying—the same
pleasures that drive the economies of poaching and muse-
um-building. Beginning with the whispered poetry recitation
in Darse Cuenta, Rinland has consistently used a number of
formal techniques that have, in recent years, become associ-
ated with ASMR. Those That, at a Distance, Resemble Another
is a comprehensive catalogue of triggers: hands turning pages
of a book, the sounds of dripping water and spray bottles, soft
brushes wiping surfaces clean, unboxing, cutting with scissors,
crinkly plastic wrap, drawing and tracing, demonstrative hand
gestures, latex gloves, rubbing with sponges, and fingers pulling
lint from a vacuum bag.
Nearly an hour into the 67-minute film, Rinland inserts a
rare wide shot of a man clumsily stacking tusks and ivory carv-
ings on the bottom shelf of a storage closet, and the noisy ba-
nality of his work breaks the long-sustained, hypnotic reverie.
He’s not alone. Other workers make small talk, scrub plastic
bins, and sweep floors in sterile back rooms. Rinland then cat-
alogues, via red-on-black text, the names of the people with
whom she collaborated at a dozen museums. Only in the penul-
timate shot, when the workers wander outside to enjoy a snack
of watermelon, do they appear to truly experience the wonders
of the natural world.
15
I See a Darkness
Pedro Costa on Vitalina Varela

BY HADEN GUEST AND MARK PERANSON

A moving study of mourning and memory, Pedro Costa’s reve-

latory new film offers an indelible portrait of Vitalina Taveres
Varela, a fragile yet indomitable woman who makes the long
voyage from Cape Verde to Lisbon to attend her estranged
husband’s funeral, but misses the event itself because of cruel
bureaucratic delays. The name and tragic story will be famil-
iar to those who know Costa’s previous masterwork,  Horse
Money (2014), in which Vitalina appears as one of the ghostly
figures alternately confronting and comforting Costa regular
Ventura during his soul-searching stay in a haunted sanatori-
um.  Vitalina Varela forms a diptych with that earlier film, ex-
tending its intermingling of personal and national trauma while
refining Costa’s unique mode of oneiric first-person cinema in
which inner voices are theatrically recited like prayers. Ventura
returns here as a priest gripped by a crisis of faith that recalls
the fear, trembling, and self-doubt animating his somnambu-
lant patient in Horse Money. Vitalina’s singular presence, mean-
while, is dramatically expanded into a mesmerizing starring
turn, which lends simmering power to the larger project shaped

16
across Costa’s films post-In Vanda’s Room (2000): giving epic
but still intimate cinematic dimensions to the urgent struggles
of the dispossessed.
Costa’s literally and poetically darkest film,  Vitalina
Varela plunges even deeper into the endless night of phastasma-
gorical soliloquies and serpentine wanderings. The extended,
pre-credit opening sequence  reveals Costa’s commitment to a
film-noir darkness that is simultaneously palpable and ethereal,
equally an expression of his sculptural poetics and of his char-
acters’ imperilled status on the far margins of society. Under a
starless night sky, a small parade of tired men in funereal black
slowly marches past a high-walled cemetery. Two help along an
unstable Ventura, until he falls in exhaustion beside the road
while the rest of the men drift back to their respective homes. In
a beautifully rhythmic sequence, Costa follows each of the men
as they open and close the creaking metal doors of their hum-
ble cinder-block houses, pausing statuesquely before entering,
as if to make clear an expressive connection between the weary
bodies and worn buildings. Indeed, Costa offers the dilapidat-
ed houses as intimate realms to be respectfully explored, as he
transforms the weathered buildings into luminous, almost 3D
icons of the protected life and space so longed for by Vitalina.
Costa has always subtly mined deep meaning from the lived-
in and most often hand-built spaces inhabited by his characters
and collaborators: spaces that are both private and communal,
isolated yet interconnected by the murmur of neighbourhood
sounds that pass through their thin walls. In  Vitalina Varela,
Costa finds a richly symbolic dimension in those buildings that
best reveal the inner lives of Vitalina and Ventura: her cher-
ished but abandoned house in Cape Verde, her dead husband’s
ramshackle Lisbon home, and Ventura’s empty, seemingly
abandoned church. The parallel suggested between dilapidated
home and church as equal expressions of Vitalina and Ventura’s
alienation from the world underscores a newly explicit sacred
dimension in Costa’s cinema, one given overt expression in the
film’s second half in the dialogue and prayers shared by the two
characters as Vitalina struggles to understand her paradoxical
love for the man who abandoned her, and Ventura grapples with
a fateful moment when he neglected his sacred charge. Like the
abandoned structures they inhabit, Vitalina and Ventura des-
perately need to be shored up and protected from the elements
by a sturdy roof.  in Cape Verde. Miraculous too seems the blue and open sky in
An early signal of the spiritual symbolism and direction
of  Vitalina Varela  is given in the film’s opening sequence and
first close-up: a worn, purple-graffiti crucifix that seems to con-
front Ventura immediately after he breaks from the funeral
procession to rest beside the road. Everyday objects and sites
are transformed by Costa into sacred symbols and shrines that
shimmer with fervent private meaning as instruments for holy
rites, like the bottles of perfume set solemnly as offerings on
Vitalina’s candlelit table by an ex-cellmate of her husband, or
the utility poles shown that become vernacular crucifixes and
symbols of Ventura and Vitalina’s search for truth and reckon-
ing. At another point, rhythmic close-ups of Ventura’s hands
leaning against the base of the same kind of utility poles as he
slowly finds his way back to his church transforms these every-
day markers into stations of a private Passion. 
Costa, of course, masterfully understands and embraces the
power of cinema to give grace and gravity to the everyday, to
transform non-actors into wondrous cine-theatrical presences
equal to those of Rossellini, Straub-Huillet, Reis, and Condeiro.
But to those artists’ austere control, Costa adds an element of
the thrillingly cinematic sublime: there could be no better ex-
ample than Vitalina’s stunning and dramatically delayed en-
trance, when she appears as a backlit silhouette standing in
the doorway of a phantom airplane taxiing towards a chorus of
women poised on the tarmac, airport janitors anxious to con-
sole the weary traveller. In Horse Money, Vitalina tells of the fe-
ver and incontinence that wracked her body during her difficult
delayed flight, but as she here descends the metal stairs bare-
foot, dripping wet, it is as if she had swum or walked across the
ocean: the close-up of her unshod feet shedding shining drop-
lets onto the steps is an image of a saint or a superhero, a state-
ment of strength, naked vulnerability, and sanctity.
Costa’s is a willfully pure cinema, an uncompromised and
rapturous mode of B-film able to abandon and reinvent the
rules and traditions of the classical cinema he understands so
well. How fitting, then, that Vitalina’s entrance poignantly ech-
oes the delirious and fateful airport ending of Joseph H. Lewis’
(and John Alton’s) minor magnum opus The Big Combo (1955),
and that the wind so frightening to Vitalina as she lays awake in
her bed seems ushered from the films of Sjöström, Murnau, or
perhaps Borzage. In Vitalina Varela Costa makes clear that, like
these filmmakers (and like Borzage especially), he understands
and fervently believes in the potential of cinema to realize mir-
acles onscreen—whether to cure infirmities of the body and
soul, to bend the present back to recover the past, or to calm the
winds of the most savage storm. Indeed, a series of small, pro-
found miracles move Vitalina, drawing her out of her isolation
to discover new friendship and perhaps forge a peace with her
past. The sound of the raging storm above her bed is magically
echoed, in a matching shot, by the neighbourhood men securing
her roof and transforming the house into her home. The image
of the men at work beneath a suddenly blue sky then cuts, mi-
raculously, back to the film’s touching closing image, of Vitalina
and her late husband Joaquim as they built their house together
this final shot, a celestial expanse only glimpsed in this largely
nocturnal and interior film.
Made in close collaboration with Vitalina and shaped around
her actual life experiences, Costa’s film is built from the same
kind of highly personal language, stories, and singular situa-
tions as his other major works, an important dimension under-
scored and even emblematized by his bold use of his heroine’s
name for his title. And yet the film contains an important politi-
cal address to a larger situation: a suggestion of Vitalina’s embit-
tered love for the man that abandoned and abused her as an echo
of the difficult pull and dependency linking former colony and
mainland, Cape Verde and Portugal, embodying the complex,
contradictory identities of the immigrant, the displaced, the
17
orphan of the storm, who is unable to find purchase on either
native or adopted soil. While Costa embraces the potential of
cinema as a mythopoetic and miraculous art, he also ultimately
refuses its utopian promise of resolution by grounding his films
in the unmistakably real lives of the collaborators who appear
onscreen. And yet, in the final image of  Vitalina Varela, Costa
also poignantly contradicts himself by offering a tender gift to
Vitalina: a purely cinematic illusion of lost innocence recov-
ered, a moving image of all-too-fleeting happiness with her late
husband, now transformed into a lasting and gently epic home
movie performed by actors. —Haden Guest
Cinema Scope: Let’s start with Vitalina. You’ve made two
films with names of women in the title, Vitalina Varela and
In Vanda’s Room, which I don’t think is a coincidence. When I
saw the new film a second time, I thought a lot about In Vanda’s
Room. The first time I saw it as an elaboration of part of Horse
Money, which of course it also is.
Pedro Costa: You were the first one to talk about Vanda.
Scope: I thought about it, and especially—I’m jumping
ahead—in terms of the sound. But I wanted to ask if you see a
comparison between the two films or the two women.
Costa: I haven’t analyzed it yet, but yeah, sure. There’s some-
thing feminine, of course. And the feelings. Going back to the
neighbourhood, yes, at all costs—and the studio, sound editing,
lights. Going back. But going back to somewhere that Vitalina
didn’t know, actually. A lot by the sounds of course, because the
rest is a bit more abstract. A certain kind of dureté…Like Vitalina
says, “feet on the ground.” That’s why we shot two or three shots
of her feet, arriving, going out, etc. She likes to say her feet are
always on the ground, even when she’s a bit confused. Vanda
was a little bit like that, too. The rest…Loneliness, it’s obvious.
They’re very alone, Vanda and Vitalina.
Scope: Did Vitalina take over the film in the same way that
Vanda did?
Costa: Yeah, in a way that a very strong presence does—the
photogenetics, almost. But from the beginning, I knew that this
would be a very dense or painful film. The problem, or the work,
would be to concentrate all of the things that Vitalina was re-
membering, because there were a thousand stories about the
husband, a thousand memories from Cape Verde, so to organ-
ize…One moment I thought that we could go back and forth be-
tween the places, but I didn’t know how to do it, so there’s just
one shot left…
Scope: Aren’t there two?
Costa: The final one is not exactly that…it’s different, I think.
In Vanda there was the same thing in that she would project us
into something. We’d go out of the room. And here we would go
to Cape Verde to donkeys and mountains, but I didn’t know how
to assemble that, so it remains an oral thing, a memory, text.
Scope: But the flashbacks are shot in Cape Verde?
Costa: They are, yeah. Just one, a girl and a boy, and then the
end. But, yes, I thought of doing a big part of “the young years,”
of the romance, and actually the building of the house. Then I
18
thought it’s not as interesting as the recollection.
Scope: Also, Joaquim the husband is totally absent. We don’t
even know really how he died.
Costa: Still I don’t know, I don’t think she knows. But again
it’s like in Vanda or Tarrafal (2007), there’s a guy who just dis-
appears and dies. That’s very common in problematic plac-
es. People just fade and disappear. And then you know they
died with a knife, or a gun. This guy was a nasty guy. The guy
who plays his friend in the film told me that in the last months
Joaquim was really probably one of the biggest dealers of the
neighbourhood, and then he got diabetes or heart disease, or
whatever…there was blood in the house, diarrhea on the floor,
he was kaput…But at the same time he had the money to go to a
hospital, etc. So it was a strange thing. But nobody knows, was it
his heart, or even drugs. Who knows?
Scope: And the rest of the story is basically what happened to
Vitalina. In that, the same thing: funeral, came three days late,
didn’t want to leave, stayed just because of…
Costa: We could jump to the last question. Why does she want
to stay? That’s also a big mystery.
Scope: It’s a mystery why she wanted to stay?
Costa: That’s what I’m afraid of, asking her and knowing the
answer at the same time. Why is she staying? Because she’s al-
ways saying, “This is no place for a woman, there’s no love here,
there’s no humanity,” and then “Cape Verde is much better, the
animals, the sun. I like to work the field, the land, my feet on the
ground.” These are all her words. So, why do you want to stay? I
never asked her, because I’m afraid of the answer. She has a son
and a daughter there. They are 19 and 21, one wants to come, but,
it’s strange…I think she wants to be alone. I’m not sure.
Scope: Was the shooting with Vitalina this time around dif-
ferent for you than in Horse Money?
Costa: In the other film, it was the first time we were getting
to know each other, me and her, all of us, the crew. When we
started this film three or four years ago, we wrote some notes,
we talked, then we began rehearsing, like theatre, we rehearse
scenes or moments of dialogue, we wonder what we can do. We
wrote the screenplay together. Actually, she wrote more of the
screenplay than I did; she didn’t write it by hand, but she mem-
orized it. You see ten or five or one minute of dialogue or mono-
logue, in the beginning it was ten or 20 minutes. My work is to
contain, to compress, to organize, divide, and build the movie.
We knew she had an obsession—the late husband—so we began
with that. You should meet your husband’s friends, talk with
them, see what happens. In that moment I understood she had a
very angry relation with all the men in that place—all those peo-
ple you see are real. And I just feel that Vitalina is much more
real than me, or you. She’s too real for a certain kind of reality.
And I miss that reality in films, and in real life. But then it wid-
ened out, because when you’re angry with someone or some-
thing, you become angry with the world, with your condition.
I work in a place where people are very, very angry and have no
means to resist, to change. The next time will be worse than this
one, you know it and I know it. It’s the way of the world, because
people are just mean to each other.
 Scope: So the ideas for specific scenes came from both
Vitalina and Ventura?
Costa: Ventura less, but the basis for Ventura’s character
comes from this moment when I asked Vitalina—which is anoth-
er frightening moment—why didn’t she want to go on the second
day she arrived to the cemetery. And she said, “I was thinking,
I was not sure.” She speaks a little bit in riddles. “Not sure…I
didn’t know my way.” “It’s written cemetery,” I said. “Yes, but I
didn’t know anyone. Nobody helps me.” So she said one day she
left the house at night to try to find the way to the cemetery, to
go there by daylight. “Why didn’t you go by daylight?” “Because
everyone could see me.”
She started following this old man, I think he had a cane,
as she felt he would lead her to the cemetery. Which is a very
strange thing and very good…to shoot. And actually, she lost this
man and she found a church, not the cemetery. So this was the
starting point for a priest. Then she told me a story of a young
priest in Cape Verde who was a little bit strict with the regula-
tions. You can be confessed if, you can be married if, etc. At the
same time, she says he was confused. And so, this day arrives
when a bunch of guys come in a kind of African taxi, and they
want to be baptized. And he refused. Perhaps another priest will
do that, so he said go away. And they went and crashed, and they
all died, and Vitalina saw that. Bodies everywhere. And this
priest came running and he lost his marbles. He was sent by the
Bishop of Cape Verde to Lisbon to be treated in an asylum. So
he’s no longer a priest, but he lives in Lisbon. We vaguely tried
to find him. Sometimes he comes to the neighbourhood to talk
with his fellow Cape Verdeans. Vitalina saw him, and says he’s
looking much better. But still he has his trousers on his knees!
It happens that Ventura knows that priest, so it’s a famous sto-
ry; Ventura’s village is ten miles from Vitalina’s. So we said,
“Ventura, you are going to be a priest,” and he was very happy.
All his neighbourhood was very surprised, so he became Priest
Ventura, and now everybody calls him Father. He says “Shut
up…stop!”
Scope: To give religion a prominent place in a movie must be
an issue for you.
Costa: It could be avoided, of course. But they all are believ-
ers, more so than the younger generation, they go to church,
Vitalina goes to church every Sunday, she sings mass. It could
be avoided, but at the same time it was very present. There are
some Christs around her house. I never saw her pray, but it’s
there. Silently there, so it’s a little bit like the drugs. You could
do the film without, but why not, why not? And then it’s kind of
delirium, so why not.
19
 Scope: Like in the last speech, when Ventura is talking in
Portuguese and Vitalina is repeating after him, it’s kind of like
religious delusion.
Costa: That’s fragments from poems, from the Bible…
Scope: Sounds like it could be the Bible, but not really...
Costa: Mainly it’s a poem, from a Romantic Portuguese poet.
Nobody found out yet.
Scope: And what is the name of this Romantic Portuguese
poet?
Costa: Antero de Quental. He was a suicidal, Romantic poet,
who died around 1890. He came before Pessoa, and Pessoa
liked him a lot. And a lot of things come from a poem called
“Shadows.” There are also a lot of Biblical things. And those ac-
tually Ventura knows, I don’t know how, but with a little twist,
let’s say. For instance, “Mirror of patience, pray for us.” I said,
“What?” “Yes, St. Joseph.” “How do you know that?” “It’s in a
Cape Verdean folk song.” Things like that. But, there’s a sort of
lonely delirium in this situation, I think. I was a bit afraid, but
the church presented itself there, it exists, we didn’t build it.
Scope: That’s not a set?
Costa: It’s there still, I hope. Even my architect friends didn’t
know it existed. It’s very African, Mississippian, and you go
inside…We shot outside and then built the inside in studio. We
copied the inside a little bit. I mean, there’s no floor, they didn’t
have time and money, nobody comes, only four women to pray
the rosary because they don’t have a priest. Everything is un-
finished, unpainted, so it has this primordial or primitive look
that’s interesting. Finding this place and imagining Ventura
alone there reminded me a bit of the elevator in Horse Money.
So it could be the same kind of delirium…and it could be a place
to have a conversation or confession. Because I need that. I need
places to escape the loneliness of the room. Vitalina told me she
sometimes wanted to go out more and was afraid or ashamed. I
understand that it must have been hard, as all the neighbours
didn’t like to see her there. We talked to a lot of people, who said
“Hmm…that house was her husband’s, not hers.”
Scope: So they didn’t fix the roof.
Costa: No, no. We are going to fix it. There’s even a little bit
of racism between them. I was amazed by the lack of solidarity,
but then again it’s much more violent than 20 years ago when we
shot the first or second film. Much more divided, people criticiz-
ing each other—the community is completely broken. Vitalina
came in 2013, after the crisis. The drugs are coming back again,
heroin, that was a big market in those places, and it helped a lot
of people to live.
Scope: Talking about the neighbourhood, which as you say
has changed immensely since In Vanda’s Room, leads to the
question about how much you shot in the studio and how much
you were shooting on location.
Costa: Everything that’s more concentrated, windows or
doors, it’s studio. We grabbed doors, we grabbed windows, we
tried to imagine light that could match. And then there are
some streets in this neighbourhood where Vitalina lives, which
is a much more white, let’s say conventional neighbourhood. In
one of the centres of that neighbourhood, there are four or five
20
streets that are a little bit like Fontainhas was, and those are the
backyards of some white families’ houses. And you have two or
three alleys, kind of a construction that resembles a Medina. So
we shot wherever we could and there was a lot of matching light-
ing work, because a lot that you see is interiors. We found this
big cinema that we turned into a studio.
Scope: Is there a different feeling shooting in the studio than
in people’s houses?
Costa: Well, Vitalina’s house became a little studio. But
it’s very small: it’s me, her, camera, and that’s it, nobody else.
Everyone outside, in the heat in summer, it’s difficult. But it’s
her house, so it’s practical, and in a way she probably needed
that too. When she’s looking, she’s looking at her mirror, her
wall, her window. But we turned it into a studio, more or less.
We left everything there, lights, tripods, so she lived in a kind
of studio for months and months, poor woman. And in the stu-
dio itself, we shot a lot of things. As I told you before, they need
that, they need the protection… again, this confirms my feeling
or intuition that they are actor’s studio. Actors that belong to
studios in the sense that Joan Crawford needed a special kind
of light, treatment, and a special kind of solitude or impris-
onment. A studio is like a prison. That’s why they got so far,
those Americanos. If you’re so reclusive, so protected from all
sorts of realities, you get there perhaps faster sometimes. And
Ventura’s not well, she’s nervous, she’s afraid…so they need to
work everyday, I need to work with them, so it’s hours and hours
and weeks and takes and takes. If we can avoid being outside,
it’s better. Ventura needs to be comfortable, and sitting down
some of the time, because he’s very tired. When we did Colossal
Youth (2006), he has an 11-minute shot where he’s standing with
the boy and now he cannot stand for more than one or two min-
utes. Even Vitalina gets tired with 30 takes of a four-minute
shot… no, it’s more comfortable, and it gives you another kind
of routine.
Scope: Is it also easier for lighting?
Costa: I’m not sure. Certainly if we would shoot daylight, in
the park, or the church, you would find ways to be lighter with
the light, using reflectors or…
Scope: Especially because it’s so dark. I assume when you
start building a set, you have an idea of how the film is going
to look, and then you have in mind how you are going to light
the space.
Costa: What happened to us, for instance in the cemetery,
was a nightmare. I said, “I think the end will be in the ceme-
tery, I think probably it will be. So everybody prepare.” And we
got the permit, then the day came to shoot and we went there,
and we had this kind of studio sky or something. I said, “Fuck.”
No light again, so it was absolutely dark. It was 3 o’clock, you
couldn’t almost see anything, it’s overexposed, high contrast.
But everything in a way came together. When they go out, it’s
even darker, even more closed than inside…It began with Vanda
and her small prison, and then you go from prisoner to guard—
they are not really prisoners, they’re their own guardians…
Fontainhas was a maze of little cells, with no comfort. There
was no real effort to make their homes there. Because they
were always waiting for something that I’m sure all of them
knew wouldn’t come or came too late—new houses, or a new
life. Vitalina was shut in that house and never opened the door,
and when she opened the door was the first day that I met her.
Now her door is slightly open every day. That’s after the film.
But she’s a force, everyone recognizes that she’s a lady to be re-
spected. But it’s very chaotic now. Much more chaotic. Coming
and going, you know. Rooms are rented. Every day there are new
faces. And the older generation tends to really disappear. Half
of the guys in that beginning procession are dead now. The guys
with the canes, all of them. It’s so, so scary.
Scope: I want to follow up more on the cinematography.
Because at the press conference yesterday, you were asked
about chiaroscuro, Caravaggio—I know, I know, but this reac-
tion is something that people are going to have. And in a way
it also distracts from other things in the film, because the cin-
ematography is so overwhelming. What led you more into this
aesthetic direction?
Costa: There’s not much light inside Vitalina’s house, that’s
the truth. The guy didn’t build any capable windows, like she
says, just small holes in the walls. It’s very damp, very cold, the
roof is what it is, so it’s dark, and this main location, the neigh-
bourhood, even by daylight, as you see in Vanda especially, it’s
confined—even the light arrives a bit late. It’s my, I wouldn’t
say “taste,” but the studio, the interior of the house, the light…I
think I work better like that. I’m less interested by the opposite,
and that was probably one of the reasons that we didn’t go more
for the flashbacks. But one day, who knows? For now we are still
in that moment of her life, and that moment she describes as a
nightmare—sleepless nights, always inside, and no desire what-
soever to escape. She was just waiting for something. I asked
her two or three times, if we wouldn’t have met, what would
have happened? And she said, “Probably nothing.” During the
making of, or a little bit after Horse Money, she worked in two or
three houses as a cleaning lady, she didn’t get paid, and then she
worked at Zara, that’s why there are some perfumes in the shot.
Actually, they are her perfumes.
Scope: How do you work with the cinematographer, Leonardo
Simões?
Costa: In the beginning I thought I could work more like in
Horse Money, where I did much more, but I still did a lot, even
practically, with my hands, because we are three, so it’s a lot of
work. This one is more dense, let’s say, more painful too. Horse
Money had kind of a fantasy that this one doesn’t have. So for
Leonardo it was very, very hard work, because the space is so
small, and we like to work with small lights, so very punctual,
very oriented sources, a lot—not just one or two—so it’s a lot of
time to prepare, sometimes too much. Too much in a sense that
21
we had Vitalina waiting or other guys waiting, less in the stu-
dio, more in her house. There were walls in the studio, so it was
bigger and you could breathe a little bit more. So I talked and
made adjustments or suggested things, but it was much more
him than myself. But it’s a collaboration. I know what I wanted
and what he likes more or less. It was elaborate and complex and
always difficult in digital.
Scope: It’s a different camera, though?
Costa: It’s a different camera, it’s a bigger camera. But I
wouldn’t say better.
Scope: Because of the amount of darkness?
Costa: No, because I won this camera in a prize at the
Munich Film Festival. The ARRI/OSRAM prize. Two tradi-
tional, respected German corporations. Godard can tell you
about ARRI and OSRAM. OSRAM invented the lamps to light
up the Olympics in that year, so. I won that camera there, and
it’s a good camera, so we have this bigger, better camera. But
it doesn’t mean easier. Digital is very difficult too, I’m sure.
Leonardo was always saying, “I’m not sure, I’m not sure,” but
I think if we would shoot in 35mm or 16mm we would get the
same thing—not better, but quicker. Because textures and sur-
faces respond very different to film or digital. I would even say
that In Vanda’s Room it’s more interesting to let it be with the
pixels, the movement, and the noise, then to have it clean in 4K.
Digital isn’t made to film skies, for instance: it’s always very bad.
Caroline Champetier complains about the skies, the blue, the
clouds, the contours…inside it’s the same thing and with arti-
ficial lights, but well, we go, and we take some roads. And then
there are some things that are quite extreme and radical, shots
that are really dark and there are no faces, but it’s either do that
or something so complex and sophisticated, but that’s beyond
our means.
Scope: I mentioned the sound earlier as it relates to Vanda…
Costa: I think in my mind the sound comes from the desire
to go back to the sounds of the old neighbourhood. This sound is
very composed. But it’s a real memory of what it used to be, what
it still is sometimes, because I spend lots of days and nights at
Vitalina’s, like I used to at Vanda’s. And the most painful mo-
ments of Vitalina recollecting, remembering something very
awful, can have the most amazing soundtrack in reality. Like a
couple talking about sex or something, and you can mostly hear
everything. So again, like in Vanda, no pain is private or no joy
is a secret. There is always a very nice contradiction in the mon-
tage. Even Ventura’s mass was a bit studio, but not enough to
block the trains and cars and planes, so we tried to arrange it to
have a good, direct sound. When I was rehearsing with Vitalina
or on days when we didn’t shoot, the sound guy was recording
here and there. In other places, we got some nice sound, ambient
sound, noises and things.
Scope: Chickens.
Costa: Well, the chickens, that’s recorded close to that
church, because it’s a little bit removed. When you get there, it’s
even more strange: who did this, what for, and why and who’s re-
sponsible? Who’s in charge? It’s close to a place where Vitalina
also used to have a small garden, that’s what she likes, growing
22
her potatoes and stuff, cabbage. They all have a little piece of
land, illegal absolutely, close to a Metro station, it’s completely
chaotic with shacks, and this church has lots of chickens, sick
horses, like Don Quixote horses with bellies, some pigs, one or
two goats. It’s very “suburban,” but that’s her thing. She said,
“What saved me was the garden, just going there, working the
land. I forget everything, I’m happy.” So, yeah, the chickens, the
birds, the animals, cats, that used to be Fontainhas—now it’s not
really like that, even if, when Vitalina is in the bedroom, which
is the part of the house that’s really interior, there’s a lot of com-
munication with the neighbours, so we recorded a lot of things
there: conversations, dinners, TVs, music.
Scope: I would say that there’s no songs, but I guess Ventura
sings two lines at one point…and the techno.
Costa: Ah, the techno. Before Horse Money, I met this young
DJ, he’s half Cape Verdean and half I think Angolan or some-
thing. But he’s really famous, he does the MoMA raves. He’s
called DJ Marfox, and he said whenever you want, I’ll give you
my music—so that’s his music, super heavy techno metal or
something, I don’t know. On the background there’s some more,
and in a good theatre, with good sound, you’ll hear a lot more,
even subliminal sometimes—not riffs, but frequencies from his
beat box.
Scope: The sound of the power. Like that shot of the electric-
ity post.
Costa: Exactly, yes, because all these kids—the musicians
and the ones that just listen to music— are in these neighbour-
hoods, they aren’t going away, they still are with parents, so it’s a
sound that you hear in these places. Of course, it’s contradictory
to a lot of grief and silence and pain that goes around the houses.
If you walk around this neighbourhood today, inside the hous-
es you will see images and tableaux of misery and grief, and the
sound is this kind of metal machine music. But I didn’t want to
step on that pedal. Down there you can hear it, with the TVs, but
then no music, no, nothing else. Ventura sings a little bit of the
Agnus Dei, but he gives up immediately. He was always afraid of
Vitalina. He met his match. They are friends, even cousins they
say, very far, second mother of the father of the second husband.
But when they did things together, there was some tension,
there was “acting.” Vitalina is talking about her experience, her
life, she’s a little bit showing off or trying to portray some stuff,
but with Ventura there was acting.
Scope: You mean they were trying to out-act each other?
Showing off?
Costa: In a way. Because now Ventura has become a little bit
the pro, so sometimes now he feels that, and he said, “Vitalina’s
great, she’s nice, she looks good.”
Scope: Does she remind you of any other actresses?
Costa: Not yet. Maybe. You?
Scope: No. I don’t know whether I said this last time but the
look, when you see her also in Horse Money also, she’s like a
Black Panther, with the leather jacket…
Costa: Oh, yeah. The sound guy didn’t like it. It squeaks a lot.
But that’s the jacket she wore when she stepped down the stairs
of the plane. So, forever, it will be that jacket. But there’s some-
thing the other day in her eyes that reminded of…yeah, of Greed
(1924), staring, not a blank stare, but staring over the camera,
over everything. And very bright. Even Ventura got a little emo-
tional. He’s not a religious guy, but even he got a little bit trans-
ported. Well, I told him, when you are going to talk, imagine one
of your colleagues that died on the construction site or some-
thing. So he did, and I don’t know, maybe he got…
Scope: The Method? To move to another topic, the pacing
of the movie is also interesting, in that it works on a one-level
rhythm, methodical. But then you have the shock cuts to the
airport, the frying pan, the pole, the roof. When you sat down
to edit, did you think of that as a way of getting people outside of
the space, or is it necessary to make everything a little less dark,
or depressing? Or are the punctuations are just rhythmic?
Costa: Yeah, it’s more that. I always thought that the arrival
at the airport would be a sound thing more than a visual. But, at
the same time, I wanted really to have some wings and planes
and metal, and to be a kind of cold, cold nightmare.
Scope: But before that is a very long, dark sequence with no
dialogue. It’s a total shock when that happens. It’s extremely ef-
fective, placing that scene there…
Costa: The beginning was there since the beginning. After
the burial, cleaning the house of all the traces of bad things—a
lot of gypsies do it, Africans do it. Different kinds of herbs,
cleaning the spirits. So, yeah, it was there since I thought about
the first ten, 20 minutes of the film. The idea was, actually more
than that, coming home, after the burial, men coming home to
their wives.
Scope: Well, it looks like a post-Civil War procession. It
looked like they were, say, an army, all these guys with canes,
some blood…
Costa: Sometimes we thought this is a procession of old
soldiers or something. But then coming home, not wanting to,
those two gangsters cleaning the house. And then Vitalina ar-
rives in a very spectacular, noisy way, a kind of cloud of metal,
and with her the film begins. She takes over, and that’s anoth-
er pace. But in the beginning there are a lot of shots, and a lot
of angles, and then it’s more reflexive. It’s the later half of the
film that I wasn’t sure about, because of those flashbacks. I had
this moment of hesitation. Should we go back? And then no, just
those two shots. But for the later part of the film I was searching
for something, and then I remembered this…remembered, well,
I experienced it in Cape Verde, which is nothing original, but
it’s exactly like Jean Rouch. I remembered this thing in Cape
Verde: “The spirit of my grandmother appeared yesterday but
I didn’t understand, she was speaking in Portuguese.” I said,
“What, but you speak Creole?” “Yeah, but when they come, they
speak in Portuguese.” So it’s a little bit like the trance and cer-
emonies in Jean Rouch films, when they dress up like the kings
of France. All the spirits of Cape Verdeans speak in Portuguese.
23
So, I remembered that and said, “Ah, Ventura perhaps you could
teach her Portuguese so that she would be more comfortable
to go work in Zara,” and they understood that perfectly. And so
that gave two or three last long scenes that take you to the end.
So the Bible and the poem entered in a nice way, and everything
came together because if not it would even be more dark, I
think. And the Judas thing came in strangely, very nicely into
the picture.
Scope: Did you shoot scenes that you didn’t use?
Costa: No. That’s good, that’s happening to me a lot. As you
know, I’m an avid reader of the old masters, and the other day
I was reading about Henry King—not bad, you know him. He
has an interview saying, “You know, we shoot 50 scenes, 50
scenes in a movie. Do not trash, do not imagine things.” It’s a bit
Straubian, too.
Scope: Yeah, but Henry King didn’t shoot films over two
years.
Costa: I do a lot of takes, yeah. Perhaps even more here than
in Horse Money. Takes, rehearsals, camera rolling and rehears-
al. Then after ten minutes, they start, everything’s in there, the
preparation, the sneezes, everything, suspension, me going in
the shot etc., lights. But 30 would be the number of takes, 20 let’s
say, at a minimum, and then we would do variations.
Scope: Variations on the dialogue? Or gestures.
Costa: More the gestures, posture, and very small things,
ways of looking, head turning—nothing spectacular, but it
helped a lot to understand what I like, what I don’t like, what
they could do better. We probably have ten shots that are ran-
dom, that don’t belong here or there, beginnings of things,
nothing special. It’s the contrary of not knowing where we are
going—there’s nothing of that, it’s very, very concentrated, and
then we finish that scene and it seems solid or competent, we go
to another scene. I never, never go to something that I don’t try.
When we begin trying I’m pretty sure that we’re going to get it.
But that comes with Ventura, Vanda, Vitalina, even the second-
ary guys, they give me the confidence. Either I’m too irresponsi-
ble or too lucky, I don’t know.
Scope: I think in talking about Colossal Youth you mentioned
that you went back to scenes months later.
Costa: But that’s different. In Vanda it happened a lot too.
In Vanda there’s that one thing that I wanted to do when they
were too emotional, and then months later I went back and they
were fine. That can happen. In this film, less. You know, Vanda
was younger, drugs are something else. They give you a kind of
strange energy in a certain way, so she was there like a horse
during the film. Even if Vitalina’s very strong, it was always
about coming back to this dark moment. He died, he escaped, he
didn’t talk, he wasn’t there, he’s a coward, they’re all cowards,
etc. So, we were a little bit careful with that because she got re-
ally tired…just imagine the shots where she confesses. It’s pain-
ful for us. Barbara Stanwyck would do it five times and then say,
“Let’s go, guys, have a drink at Musso’s.” Not Vitalina. She would
continue for ten minutes, half an hour, and then we had to leave
and close the door, and it was really painful to watch that, and to
24
be there. There’s no way you can comfort her. So, no, in this one
we didn’t go back.
But with Ventura it was different. I think he felt, or I felt,
that it could be the other side of Horse Money. In Horse Money
he’s unsure, trembling, fragile, dying, and in this one he’s quite
sure. I mean, it’s lost. He tells them, “I know the book, I know
the text, I know the code. But it’s lost. I can tell you, but it’s
no use.” So he has this confidence, that I see it in two or three
shots at the end, when he’s telling her the story that Judas
is always really the master, he knows he won’t convince an-
yone, but…he was telling it to himself, to convince himself.
Sometimes when I see the shot he’s trying to go back to some
kind of horizon or faith or happiness or something. It was very
spectacular for us to see him do that. There was a transfor-
mation, and it was really different, he felt it. He said, “Oh, no
more pajamas, no more soldier,” so this was kind of a relief in
a way. And even when he’s saying, “I lost my faith, this is very
sad, nobody helped, this is a dark hole,” he says it with a kind of
almost satisfaction.
Scope: You’ll like this question: the scene of Vitalina on the
roof.
Costa: When she’s up there? With the wind?
Scope: Green screen?
Costa: Yeah.
Scope: Is that the only time?
Costa: Yeah. We tried rear projection, and it didn’t work that
well because it was too dark to have the sky move and I want-
ed the sky to move. But that was a big space, and we got a lot of
wind because we had an airplane engine. That’s what they use
apparently. A guy came with a truck, it’s powerful, huh, and
then Vitalina said a wonderful thing: “You are just kids, you
don’t know, back home when there’s wind, we really have some
demons there. This is kids’ stuff.” Yeah, but, first I thought there
could also be rain, but it was too difficult. But action things for
her are easy: she’s used to it, no problem.
Scope: She liked hitting her head?
Costa: She loves that.
Scope: Bricks falling down in the shower.
Costa: That happened to her. She says, “If I was not a black
lady with this hair, I would be dead now.” I’m sure she would.
So, it’s all true.
Scope: What didn’t happen to her, is the question?
Costa: Yes, exactly. To them…it’s not only her. It’s like Cluny
Brown (1946), Curse of the Demon (1957). I wonder what comes
next.
Scope: Well, can it get darker?
Costa: Why not? Are you against darkness?
Scope: No.
Costa: It can get brighter, who knows. We’ll see.
Scope: Like you said, it would be brighter if you shot in Cape
Verde again.
Costa: Not sure. Some Anthony Mann Westerns are quite
dark…they are. Exterior day, but quite dark, quite strange. The
wider, the stranger. I don’t know, we’ll see.
 Woman on the Verge
of a Nervous Breakdown
Kazik Radwanski’s Anne at 13,000 ft
BY JOSH CABRITA

With his first two features, Tower (2012) and How Heavy This
Hammer (2015), Toronto-based director and MDFF co-founder
Kazik Radwanski established something of a recurring archetype:
sad, lonely, and horny men whose unpleasant or uninteresting
qualities are accentuated by the director’s unrelenting approach
of shooting almost entirely in medium close-ups. The prospect of
spending an hour and a half with people lacking in notable virtue,
alluring vice, or any apparent interest, may seem like an unpro-
ductive exercise in forced empathy—but consider this skepticism
a function, as opposed to a fault, of these tightly orchestrated,
seemingly soporific character studies. Although Tower’s Derek
(Derek Bogart), an aspiring animator afflicted by premature hair
loss, and How Heavy This Hammer’s Erwin (Erwin Van Cotthem),
a neglectful father who wastes his life on an online video game, can
be entitled jerks, their motivations, thoughts, and feelings remain

25
obscure. Who could honestly say, having spent a significant period
of time in such close proximity to these men, that they truly under-
stand them—that they know, for instance, why Derek is hell-bent
on sabotaging almost every single one of his social interactions,
or why Erwin, when sitting blank-faced and lightly illuminated by
his monitor, experiences a satisfaction that supersedes every oth-
er potential pleasure in his life?
While much of contemporary realist cinema can be said to be
indebted to the Dardennes, the parallels between the Belgian
brothers and Radwanski are particularly apparent: in their con-
cern for those living on the margins of society, in their interest in
what is often referred to as “naturalistic” performances, and in
their highly mobile, incredibly controlled, and usually handheld
camerawork, which bears superficial similarities to the “fly-on-
the-wall” aesthetic of documentary. But if we think a little hard-
er and consider the stages of their respective artistic processes,
the ways in which the Dardennes and Radwanski construct their
films around first principles about the ontology of their chosen
medium, what may have first been a casual resemblance becomes
something a little more tangible. In a piece on the Dardennes’
L’enfant (2005), filmmaker and critic Dan Sallitt writes that “all
effects in the Dardennes’ films are pegged to the phenomenolo-
gy of photography, to the exterior viewpoint that the photograph
enforces on the most interior events. Even the performance style
in the Dardennes’ movies…is calibrated to the limitations of the
image in revealing inner life.” By speaking of the “phenomenology
of photography,” one need not be referring to a medium-specific
“essence” that can be easily contained or discerned within a gen-
re as inflexible as, say, “realism”; rather, one could point out the
simple, perhaps overly obvious fact that cinema, like the written
word or the staged drama, has certain distinct properties, and that
these properties allow for certain kinds of articulation, even as
they limit others.
All of Radwanski’s films to date have been about revealing and
respecting this limit. They are the work of a person who has an-
swered, for himself at least, that core Bazinian question—what
is cinema?—and sought to approach his subjects with that first
principle in mind. Thus, while all of Radwanski’s films function as
deft character studies, they are also remarkable as works of theo-
ry, in the sense that Stanley Cavell defined the term in The World
Viewed: “giving significance to and placing significance in specific
possibilities of the physical medium of film.” So how, then, does
Radwanski employ the specific possibilities of the medium in his
latest feature, Anne at 13,000 ft (premiering in TIFF’s Platform
section), to tell the story of the title character (Deragh Campbell),
a twentysomething daycare supervisor whose unprompted out-
bursts of euphoria and severe expressions of depression align with
the symptoms of bipolar disorder?
Insofar as the film’s vignette-like structure allows the viewer to
construct a cogent timeline, Anne seems to take place over a sin-
gle manic-depressive cycle—which, one is led to presume, roughly
coincides with the time it takes for Anne to train for and execute
a solo skydive while still maintaining some semblance of a normal
life. When we first meet the protagonist, in a pre-credits sequence
that juxtaposes her playing at work and skydiving at a co-worker’s
26
bachelorette party, she is, quite literally, at her peak; some brief
70 minutes later, she will return to this same precipice, presum-
ably in the same headspace. In between these bookends, her rela-
tionship to her employer, her family, and her friends will undergo
a series of stress tests, some of which will hold (like that with her
friend of three years) while others (like her casual courtship with
a man she met at the aforementioned friend’s wedding) will not.
Anne can be difficult to keep up with: when she’s not painting her
house for no apparent reason, climbing through the windows of
dwellings that seemingly belong to strangers, guzzling wine while
babysitting, arriving at her boyfriend’s house unannounced, or
recklessly attempting to dive from a moving vehicle, she can be
caring and considerate, quite good with kids, but also more than
a bit reckless.
If the trajectory of Anne at 13,000 ft is as tightly telegraphed as
the above description makes it appear, the frantic manner in which
new characters and problems are introduced serves to underline
one simple, unfortunate fact of Anne’s life: that the world mostly
maintains a state of stability while her wildly unpredictable be-
haviour follows an erratic track from depression to equilibrium,
equilibrium to euphoria, euphoria to depression, and so on, ad in-
finitum. Anne has clearly gone through these cycles many times
before, and she has, in the process, received the support of many
people around her; by contrast, the viewer, who has no familiarity
with her emotional dynamics, is unable to have such a perfunctory
relationship to her destructive coping mechanisms. So as to even
further distanciate the viewer’s perspective of Anne’s life from her
own view of these same events, Radwanski continually constructs
his scenes around missing or partial information. When the (sin-
gle) father of one of Anne’s babysitting charges catches the protag-
onist downing a bottle of wine while on the child-watching clock,
our initial reaction is an expectation of a conventionally outraged
response, and vicarious concern for Anne. When the dad doesn’t
bat an eye at this trespass, however, we are compelled to consider
a new range of possibilities: e.g., that he and Anne have had some
romantic interactions in the past, that he is planning a pass now, or
perhaps something entirely outside this field.
As in Radwanski’s previous films, in Anne at 13,000 ft the close-
up is never a window into a subject’s soul, and possesses no explan-
atory power. Instead of being a lugubrious exercise in the most
facile form of humanist filmmaking—a limited register wherein
all that matters is the director’s and viewer’s supposedly generous
response to an apparently difficult person—Anne takes a purely
external viewpoint that allows for the contemplation of various
surfaces. It is all fine and well for us to identify with the protag-
onist’s plight, but only insofar as her intentions derive from our
own speculations. Anne’s “essence” or her “psychology” are not
this film’s concern, and are in many ways antithetical to the film’s
formal approach. Yet as inscrutable as Anne’s inner workings may
be, it is they that shape the film’s structure. There’s clearly some
sort of causal relationship between each scene, but the precise na-
ture of that cause—whether it be mood, or circumstance, or some
combination of the two—cannot be known.
This dynamic obviously introduces a problem for how
Radwanski can depict the character. Beholden on the one hand
to a protagonist whose psychology becomes progressively fore-
grounded, while on the other hand seemingly committed to a view
that cinema is incapable of revealing the mechanisms underlying
an individual’s behaviour, Radwanski finds a solution by synthe-
sizing two fundamentally distinct traditions. There is, firstly, the
staunchly materialist mode of Bresson, which so strictly adheres
to the external parameters of photography that it essentializes
human life to a series of mechanistic, pre-planned movements.
Secondly, there is a certain school of realism—often associated
with the films of Cassavetes—which seeks to reveal supposedly
knowable being through an interplay of signs that indicate “the
truth of the moment.” These two (perhaps artificially dichoto-
mous) traditions are typically thought of as incompatible: while
the former reorients every aspect of its form (particularly the
performances) to adamantly acknowledge the limitations of pho-
tography’s exterior viewpoint, the latter uses the peculiarities and
eccentricities of its actors to signal the existence of their appar-
ently knowable essence.
The reason that this synthesis works so well in Anne at 13,000
ft is because of the indefatigable performance by Campbell, who
is best known for her highly affected, deliberately uncanny turns
in micro-budget Toronto productions like Lev Lewis’ The Intestine
(2016) and Antoine Bourges’ Fail to Appear (2017), as well as for
her ongoing role as Sofia Bohdanowicz’s onscreen surrogate in
Never Eat Alone (2016) and this year’s MS Slavic 7 (see Cinema
Scope 78), which she also co-directed. Without any knowledge
of her prior work or how other directors have made use of her
distinctive diction in the past, one could very well suspect that
Radwanski has, once again, found a non-professional actor whose
real-life traits coincide with (and help determine) those of the
character. But even though Campbell is a professional, her diligent
attempt to create a sense of her character’s internal consistency
across time and space, when integrated with the film’s other signs
of the unguarded real (e.g., the classroom scenes, which are full of
spontaneous actions and delightful little interruptions), provides
the forceful impression of an indivisible person whose only con-
stant is change. That being said, even if we could convincingly pos-
it that, somewhere, an independent and persisting self may exist,
in the terms of Radwanski’s studiedly modest (and increasingly
masterful) filmmaking, we must also acknowledge that it can and
must remain an abstraction, a potential illusion, and ultimately a
subject outside of cinema’s purview.
27
The Taste
of Summer
The Film Farm at 25
BY CAYLEY JAMES

Minus

“You’ll have to trust me that where
it seems like nothing could exist,
something always does. And there’s
something here.”
—Sarah Abbot, Froglight (1997)
In 2014, Phil Hoffman published a piece in Film Manifestos and
Global Cinema Cultures entitled “Your Film Farm Manifesto of
Process Cinema.” The text was a call to action born out of years
of teaching and facilitating opportunities for artists hungry
to immerse themselves in the physical medium of film at the
Independent Imaging Retreat. Hoffman had conceived of this an-
nual workshop with colleagues in 1994 on his property in Mount
Forest, two hours northwest of Toronto—a rural haven that earned
its nickname of the Film Farm. Though the manifesto’s first lines
read more like a challenge than an invitation—“Enter through the
big barn doors, without sketches and scripts, without props and
actors”—the tone then shifts, turning to encouragement for those
willing to eschew perfectionism for exploration. “Your films will
surface through the relationship between your camera and what
passes in front. It may take the whole of the workshop for you to
shake away the habit of planning, what has become the guiding
light of the economy-driven film world.”

28
 Some 300 participants from around the world (two-thirds ent about having this kind of workshop with people together and
of whom have identified as women) have entered through those away from the centre.”
barn doors over the past quarter-century, and this summer the Hoffman bought the 50-acre Mount Forest property in 1992
Farm marked that milestone with a two-night retrospective and along with his then-partner, writer and filmmaker Marian
a month-long exhibition at TIFF’s Film Reference Library, which McMahon, with the intention of using the space as a venue for such
included a plethora of archival materials (photographs, video workshops. The very first Independent Imaging Retreat in 1994
diaries, films) as well as viewing stations where one could watch almost didn’t occur, as the inaugural cohort fell four participants
80 films produced at the Retreat over the years. Looking over the short of the required ten specified in the agreement with Sheridan
names of the workshop’s participants on the exhibition wall reaf- College, the program’s initial funder. Despite this rocky start, the
firms the significant impact that this one-week residency program Retreat quickly gained momentum in its subsequent editions as
has had on experimental filmmaking: referred to by Oakland- word spread through Hoffman’s international network of teach-
based filmmaker, curator, and critic Brett Kashmere as a “Who’s ing appointments and screenings, and there has been a waiting
Who of North American Experimental Cinema and Alternative list ever since. Over the years, the site has been retrofitted for the
Media,” the list includes such names as Helen Hill, David Gatten, needs of the annual visitors, and is now equipped with two screen-
Christina Zeidler, Allyson Mitchell, Michelle Pearson Clarke, and ing spaces in the barn (one downstairs for the day, one upstairs for
John Greyson, to name just a few. the evening) and three dark rooms. Hoffman has gathered togeth-
Hoffman, of course, is himself a prominent member of that er a capable and experienced staff of Film Farm alumni and oth-
company. As Peter Greenaway wrote in a letter of support to the er artists—Deirdre Logue, Rob Butterworth, Scott Miller Berry,
Canada Arts Council in 1984, Hoffman’s quietly revolutionary Terra Jean Long, and Christine Harrison—whom past participant
films “blithely side[step] the orthodoxies so taken for grant- Ken Paul Rosenthal called “the angels,” swooping in to prob-
ed by those who believe documentary cinema is an education- lem-solve and offer advice at crucial creative crossroads.
al rostrum.” Maintaining an intimate, first-person perspective As outlined in the Retreat’s manifesto and mandate, par-
across works that range from travelogues (The Road Ended at ticipants are instructed to arrive at the Farm with no script or
the Beach, 1983) to psycho-geographic studies (Kitchener-Berlin, pre-conceived idea of the films they will make; they must trust
1990), Hoffman reassembles documentary conventions to create that, between the workshops and discussions, inspiration will
something entirely new, questioning the ethics of image-mak- strike. This ideal of spontaneity has a firm foundation, however.
ing and ruminating on death, landscape, memory, and rebirth. The attendees are immediately immersed in both the philosophy
What is most evident throughout his 40-year career is the flu- of the Retreat and the rhythms of communal living and collabo-
id way in which his life feeds into the work and vice versa. His ration, and while they are encouraged to trust in the process of
most celebrated film, ?O,ZOO! (The Making of a Fiction Film) intuitive creation, in accordance with the Farm’s anti-capitalist
(1986)—shot primarily during the production of Greenaway’s ethos there is no expectation for them to produce a fully complet-
A Zed & Two Noughts (1985), at a time when Hoffman was ap- ed film by the conclusion of the workshop. As Hoffman has come
prenticing with the British filmmaker—is much more than a
document of a work in progress: as Chris Gehman notes, “fa-
miliar codes give way to family memories that, in turn, merge
with personal reflections until the whole notion of a collective
truth collapses.”
Running parallel to Hoffman’s career as a filmmaker is his work
as a teacher, first in the Media Arts Program at Sheridan College—
where he had honed his craft as a student in the ’70s under the tu-
telage of Jeffrey Paull and alongside peers such as Mike Hoolboom
and Richard Kerr, forming a cohort that has become known as the
Escarpment School—and, since 1999, in York University’s Cinema
and Media Arts Studies department. While the importance of ped-
agogy in Hoffman’s practice was obviously a motivating force in
the creation of the Film Farm, the most direct inspiration for the
Retreat came from his participation in the Grierson Documentary
Film Seminar, which was held annually in small towns in Ontario
between 1975 and 1989. Hoffman attended the seminar’s 1984 edi-
tion in Brockville, where workshops and master classes were facil-
itated by such filmmakers as Greenaway, Alanis Obomsawin, and
Jacques Leduc, to name but a few. “That intensity of people living
together, eating together, talking about films together reverberat-
ed throughout the next year and longer, and great friendships were
Anamnesis
made,” Hoffman reflected. “I just felt there was something differ-

29

to realize, “the intensity of the experience lingers on over the next
months, and participants come up with a film within a year, some-
times two or more.”
Many of the pieces that emerge from the Retreat are silent,
while those with sound often have warbly, distorted soundtracks,
fitting aural counterparts for the rough-hewn images. Although
the visuals all draw from a limited well of raw material (water
and sky, the flora and fauna of Mount Forest’s rolling fields, fellow
participants), watching the output of the Film Farm never feels
repetitive: thanks in large part to the almost alchemical use of
hand-processed film (which the Farm transitioned to completely
by 1999), there appears to be an infinite number of combinations
available. The respective idiosyncrasies of the final works serve to
reinforce the feeling of commonality and communality that they
share. It is no coincidence that Helen Hill preferred to call the
Retreat “Film Camp”: these films taste like summer, capturing
its heat and humidity; the season seeps into these films, becoming
an element as potent as their chemistry. The overexposed images
feel the way the sun does as it hugs the horizon while setting; the
scratches are the incessant hum of insects and the crunching of
dry brush underfoot; meandering conversations on humid after-
noons manifest themselves as voiceovers and snatched fragments
of dialogue. I have never felt so transported as I do when I watch
these short, jerky films; their energy and verve is contagious.
Steeped in imperfection, the Farm films often evoke dream-
scapes with their languid, sensual cinematography. Jennifer
Reeves’ We are going home (1998) in which three women navigate
a disorienting, surreal landscape, evokes the work of Maya Deren
in its ambitious use of time-lapse and superimposition. Chris
Chong’s Minus (1999) was aptly described by Brett Kashmere, in
the chapter he authored in Process Cinema, as “an unedited, mul-
ti-exposure, and beautifully solarized dance film [that] was born
30
We are going home
out of desperation to create a self-contained piece the night before
the final screening.” Marcia Connolly and Angela Joosse’s Film-
Landscape-People: An Exquisite Corpse (2008) cuts the frame into
thirds horizontally to create a series of visual mad libs, each layer
cutting randomly between images (fields, chickens, cameras, the
abstracted body parts of fellow participants) accompanied by a
found-sound audio track of doors squeaking on hinges, lapping
water, innocuous conversation, etc.
The most frequent mode on display, however, is the self-
portrait: creators staring down the lens of their hand-cranked
Bolex, crafting a narrative from the angles of their body, their
wrinkles, and vulnerability, and challenging the gaze of the view-
er. The simplicity of Michelle Power’s Belly (2000), in which a
woman stands serenely in a field amidst waving grass as the cam-
era inches closer to her very pregnant belly, belies the strength in
its image: where pregnancy is so often associated with an end (or at
very least a pause) to a woman’s artistic practice, Power here com-
pels the viewer to accept artist and mother as one. In Anamnesis
(2009), Scott Miller Berry literally peels away his family history
as he removes antique photographs taped to his face to reveal an
expression of exhaustion and relief. Michelle Pearson Clarke’s
Self Portrait #1 (2016) presents an austere test of endurance as
the filmmaker sits in a chair in a field, the dark film stock playing
tricks with the natural light and casting shadows across her face
for an uninterrupted two-and-a-half minutes.
The intersectionality that is an intrinsic part of the Retreat’s
philosophy—as the mandate declares, one of the primary aims of
the Film Farm is to “encourage the participation of artists typi-
cally under-represented in mainstream film production”—goes
hand in hand with its imperative to “remain financially accessi-
ble to artists.” Learning how to hand-process one’s work not only
dramatically lowers the financial barriers to filmmaking, but also
allows the filmmakers to act more like “composers or painters,”
as University of Toronto professor Bart Testa observes, to “shape
whole works with their own hands” and forge an intensely tactile
relationship to their medium. “Nothing, I mean nothing, beats
stepping on your film, rubbing it against trees, rolling around
with it in the grass or even chewing on it like bubblegum,” wrote
Cara Morton of her time at the Farm in 1996, which yielded her
piece Across (1997), a series of overexposed self-portraits in the
summer sun, free and flush with red tinting. Another piece from
that same cohort, Sarah Abbot’s Froglight, explores the relation-
ship between trust and experimentation that the Retreat seeks
to foster. As the camera weaves gently through tall grasses and
pastures, the persistent ribbit of a frog adding a metronome-like
effect on the soundtrack, Abbot’s voiceover attempts to articulate
what it means to be an artist without a plan: “Now I’m in the midst
of what Marian [McMahon] and I were talking about this morn-
ing. Experiencing something that is not a normal experience.
Something you might not believe. If you doubt me, I’ll doubt my-
self. And life will get smaller.”
Watched individually or collectively, the Farm films make a
strong case for approaching creation as the pursuit of questions
rather than answers, embracing free association and the senses
rather than controlling them and directing them towards a defi-
nite end. Deirdre Logue’s Scratch (1998), in which the artist sug-
gestively unbuttons her pants only to pull thistles out of her un-
derwear, could well provide a motto for this philosophy with the
self-reflective title cards that periodically interrupt its action:
“My path is deliberately difficult / My reasons endlessly repeti-
tious / But it is through this I know myself.” Deliberate difficul-
ty takes an even more brutally visceral turn in Solomon Nagler’s
ReRuin (2001), which rips the bucolic pastures of Mount Forest to
smithereens through extreme tinting, scratches, and jump cuts, to
the accompaniment of layered static and a nausea-inducing drone.
Dandelion
Although both the mandate and the mode of practice at the
Film Farm are inextricably linked with the medium of celluloid,
Hoffman and his staff do not posit an adversarial relationship be-
tween analogue and digital filmmaking: rather, they encourage a
conversation between the two. While many of the younger film-
makers who come to the Retreat want to have a strict relation-
ship with celluloid, shooting and finishing their works on film,
this simply isn’t possible anymore since “we don’t have the same
lab system we had when there was an industry behind them,” as
Hoffman explains. Instead, the Farm is looking to redefine the
future of hand-processing by challenging the conventional chem-
istry associated with photochemical filmmaking. While the nat-
ural environment has always been a frequent subject of the films
made at the Retreat, the staff is now seeking to incorporate natu-
ral and more ecologically friendly processing techniques, working
with seaweed from the pond, flowers and herbs that grow on the
property, and the walnut trees that were planted in the early ’90s,
which have begun to bear fruit that provides a sepia toner alter-
native. There has also been a turn toward incorporating plants
onto the film emulsion itself. In Karel Doing’s Dandelion (2018),
parts of the eponymous weed scroll past in rapid succession, an
assemblage created by combining photograms and chemigrams to
produce what the artist has dubbed “phytograms.” Franci Duran’s
most recent film, It Matters What, which began its life at last year’s
Retreat, incorporates phytograms with deteriorating found foot-
age to make a statement about the human impact on the environ-
ment and animal abuse.
It is this kind of innovative approach to handmade cinema that
ensures that the Retreat will continue to resonate with artists. It is
evident not only in the hand-lettered credits and special thanks at
the ends of the films, but in the class photos taken every year, in which
participants smile ear to ear, exhausted but joyful in what they have
learned. As Abbot says in Froglight, there’s something here.
Across
31

For a Cinema
of Bombardment
BY MICHAEL SICINSKI
I.
Although there have always been intrepid critics and cinephiles
who have engaged with films belonging to the non-narrative
avant-garde, there has existed a perception that such films, oper-
ating as they do on somewhat different aesthetic precepts, could be
considered a separate cinematic realm, one that even the most du-
tiful critic could engage with or not, as he or she saw fit. In the ’80s,
for example, there was a book series entitled Film—The Front Line
that was intended to be an annual assessment of the year in ex-
perimental cinema. The text was assigned to a different critic each
year, who would themselves decide how “experimental” would be
defined. While Jonathan Rosenbaum, in the 1983 edition, careful-
ly considered the relationship between what we once called “art
cinema” and the “co-op” avant-garde, David Ehrenstein, in the
subsequent volume, essentially dynamited said distinction, treat-
ing it like a form of aesthetic and political apartheid.
There was no volume for 1985, indicating that Ehrenstein’s ges-
ture may have been as untimely as it was necessary. Nevertheless,
when we look today at the relationship between international au-
teurist cinema and smaller-gauge, non- or para-narrative experi-
mental work, there is perhaps more mutual cognizance between
filmmakers, and greater continuity of interest among critics and
cinephiles. These two trends may be related.
32
Science Without Substance
Since the ’70s, and the movement in experimental cinema away
from the expressive models exemplified by Stan Brakhage toward
the more restrained, formalist approaches collectively charac-
terized as “structuralism,” there has been a significant increase
in both creative interchange between avant-garde and auteur-
ist narrative filmmakers, and between critics’ interests in both
realms. There are possibly anecdotal reasons for this, not least of
them being the relative placidity of structural film as compared
to the jittery, anxious work of Brakhage, as well as certain gen-
dered critiques of Brakhage’s first-person expressivity that are
well worth consideration. By contrast, the clean, open anonymity
of works by Michael Snow, Ernie Gehr, and Hollis Frampton were
often more conducive to the post-structuralist critique of the cen-
tred subject, of which the new feminist filmmaking of the era was
a part. Chantal Akerman was very frank about her debt to Snow
in particular; Yvonne Rainer cited Frampton as germinal for her
ideas about cinematic discourse, and one can see connections
between the two filmmakers, particularly with respect to part/
whole relationships.
The recognition that structural cinema might serve as a touch-
stone not only for later experimental film, but also for experimen-
tal film’s connection to the wider world of auteurist art cinema,
was slow in coming, but certain developments (in both realms)
allowed for a new canon to gradually emerge. Independent of
the avant-garde, the late ’70s and the ’80s saw a general trend
in European and especially Asian auteur cinema. The so-called
“master shot” school was an outgrowth of certain earlier mod-
ernist tendencies (Ozu especially, but also Mizoguchi, Bresson,
Antonioni, Jancsó, Angelopolous), but expanded on those formal
elements. In particular, the elegance of these masters in terms of
their use of stillness or partially obviated motion to convey certain
psychic states, or to provide an objective correlative to the subject’s
negotiation to his/her place within broader social or historical for-
mations, was explicitly expanded upon in works by Akerman, Hou
Hsiao-hsien, Tsai Ming-liang, Béla Tarr, and others.
II.
Why on earth rehash this shopworn history? What is actually
at issue here is how the dominant understanding of the canonical
avant-garde has actually been reshaped, in part, by its increased
conceptual interconnection with international auteurist art cine-
ma. In the ’70s, Peter Wollen could still write of “The Two Avant-
Gardes,” marking a fairly clean distinction between the Godard/
Straub/Kluge form of Brecht-influenced political cinema, on the
one hand, and the structural-materialist options offered by Snow,
Peter Gidal, and, oddly enough, Andy Warhol.
This history realigned, as we saw above, by the mid-’80s, with
Rosenbaum and Ehrenstein, quite argumentatively, placing film-
makers like Rivette and Ruiz alongside Robert Breer and Ken
Jacobs. By the 1989 publication of Allegories of Cinema, experi-
mental film scholar David E. James is able to chart an entirely new
path through the American avant-garde, placing Brakhage and
Warhol as the twin poles of generative epistemological experience.
(Keep in mind, P. Adams Sitney’s Visionary Film barely mentions
Warhol at all.)
Warhol is pivotal for a few reasons. He draws on narrative even
as he fundamentally abjures it; he explores themes of queer iden-
tity; and his films engage in ontological inquiry with respect to
the act of film viewing, particularly as it relates to duration. So
although, for instance, Snow’s work was formative for Akerman,
and Frampton’s for Rainer, Warhol’s work was formative for crit-
ics and scholars who were learning to read experimental cinema
within a new framework. Warhol, in a sense, provided “structur-
alism-plus,” a way to think about formal matters while also having
additional material on which to hang certain spectatorial desires.
Although I do not want to be misunderstood as claiming that
Warhol’s films were some kind of gateway drug for the avant-gar-
de, I do want to make clear that their identification with a particu-
lar performative ethic made their often real-time duration strate-
gies seem less immediately identified with abstract philosophical
ideas, more “organic” as an expression of a habitus. This could be
likened to the critical response to Akerman’s films, wherein the
use of duration was understood not just as a formal device, but as
a feminist expression of ennui, boredom, entrapment, or simply
the creation of a space for women’s labour as a profilmic event, as
in Jeanne Dielman (1975).
The enshrining of Warhol within the canon of the American
avant-garde had other consequences. The expanded interest in
duration was becoming a new dominant, one that could have mood
or ambient effects as well as concentrated phenomenological el-
ements. One could watch a “slow” experimental film not in order
to give it rapt attention, but rather to experience the mental drift
of giving one’s attention to it and taking one’s attention away, in
waves. The formal elements were not simply demonstrations of
mathematical principles: they delivered sensory affect.
As these new concerns came to the fore in experimental film
history, a new set of filmmakers emerged as major masters of the
era, many of whom had been working for years without attracting
much interest from the likes of Sitney or Annette Michelson. The
gradual, one-shot films of Larry Gottheim were rediscovered; the
soft, gradual montage style of Nathaniel Dorsky emerged during
the ’90s, but his earlier work from the ’80s was reconsidered as well.
Landscape cinema took on a greater importance, as another mode
wherein duration could be coupled with organic expression: two
long-time practitioners, James Benning and Peter Hutton, were fi-
nally given their due. Even the films of Jonas Mekas, which had al-
ways been firmly considered a part of experimental history, received
renewed critical attention, as his self-effacing claim of having been
“just filming” made his work more interesting, not less.
III.
So it should not be so difficult to see how, in the present moment,
we would arrive at something like Paul Schrader’s “Tarkovsky
Ring,” and various directors and filmmakers distributed through-
out this chart with little concern as to whether they are, strictly
speaking, international art-film auteurs, experimental filmmak-
ers, or people situated somewhere in between. The evolution
within experimental film history toward a prevalence of slow, ob-
servational cinematic modes has met art cinema at a crossroads.
When one looks at Schrader’s diagram, one sees, for example, that
Benning and Apichatpong Weerasethakul are on the same axis.
Ben Rivers is situated between Wang Bing and “Alberto” Serra.
Lisandro Alonso is outside the Ring, with Snow. Pedro Costa,
meanwhile, is playing left field, away from Serra but grouped with
Lav Diaz. But oddly enough, there’s Andy Warhol holding down
two ends of the horizontal axis.
Now, one can certainly argue with this bizarre piece of movie
math, and many already have. But what is most notable is that
Schrader is confirming the end result of a joint evolution between
experimental and auteurist cinema. Some filmmakers, such as
Rivers, Russell, and Apichatpong, now move easily between the
two realms, while still others maintain positions within the gal-
lery/museum system (Akerman, Snow, Serra, Rivers, Apichatpong,
and, of course, Warhol). But what is important is this: an aesthet-
ic dominant has established itself whereby two previously dis-
crete cinematic modes are now mutually reinforcing, and one
can see this in very material, institutional ways. TIFF’s decision
to discontinue its Visions program and bring those films under
Wavelengths, alongside more traditional forms of avant-garde
film, is an indicator of how these forms have continued to dovetail,
and how, at least from the standpoint of experimental cinema, the
values this shift reflects—temporal expansiveness, spatial coher-
33
ence, meditative pace, and an organizational schema geared for
overall cognitive mastery—have radically reconfigured our under-
standing of the medium, maybe permanently. In other words, the
Brakhage scratch and jitter has been definitively replaced by the
Warhol stare.
IV.
It could be said that this prevalence for more coherent, medita-
tive imagery is a response to the increasing bombardment of imag-
es and sounds that the mass media, and the internet in particular,
lobs at us on a daily basis. If we can postulate that what counts as
art at any given moment tends to operate in some degree of oppo-
sition to the dominant social formation, then “slow cinema” is in
some ways a response to the demands of the “society of the spec-
tacle” and the specific cognitive demands it places on its members.
Cinematic art, by contrast, is there to call upon distinctly different
competencies. And by doing so, over time new values are estab-
lished and new canons are formed.
To throw this issue into relief, I would like to cite two “failed”
works of auteurist cinema, well into the slow-cinema era. Although
they were aimed at quite different constituencies, they were both
works by visionary directors who were in complete control of their
content, and both were dramatically out of step with the aesthetic
dominants of their time. They are Peter Greenaway’s three-film
Tulse Luper Suitcases cycle (2003-2005), and the Wachowskis’
Speed Racer (2008).
Greenaway’s first Tulse Luper film, The Moab Story, debuted
in competition at Cannes, where it was deemed both tedious and
incomprehensible, a self-referential mishmash with too many
visual and sonic layers assaulting the viewer at any given moment.
Taking the work with digital software and multiple frames that
he’d first employed with The Pillow Book (1996) and expanding
it exponentially, Greenaway was felt to have, as one critic said,
“thrown everything in a blender,” with little concern for legibility.
By contrast, Speed Racer, conceived as a children’s film, was reject-
ed as a fast-moving procession of lacquered surfaces and vectors,
tracks, and tubes, with internal screens and windows drifting in
and out of the frame of reference with little concern for traditional
story space. While the Wachowskis obviously felt that they were
borrowing from the language of comics and animation, critics felt
overwhelmed by its visual language, calling it a “cinematic pile-
up” and “pop fascism.”
There are of course other auteurs who tend to operate within
this mode of velocity and density of images and sounds, and they
are taken with varying degrees of seriousness. There’s Michael
Bay, of course, whose critical stock fluctuates enough to send any
day trader into cardiac arrest, but we could also include Darren
Aronofsky, Richard Kelly, and certain passages of late Godard.
While none of these directors completely exemplifies a particular
mode of “anti-slowness,” all have been dismissed at one time or
another as overbearing, bombastic, and almost contemptuous of
their audiences.
All of these thoughts were occasioned by my recent encoun-
ter with the films of Daniel Barnett, an experimental filmmaker
34
whose name I sometimes came across in old issues of Film Culture
or Cinematograph. One got the distinct sense that he was a film-
maker’s filmmaker, someone respected in the community but
whose work had never gained significant traction in broader cir-
cles. In recent months, Barnett has placed several of his older works
on Vimeo, and I discovered what is probably his best-known film,
White Heart (1975). Operating at the juncture between Frampton’s
system-building, Jack Chambers’ cryptic mythologies, and Owen
Land’s cornball conceptualism, White Heart doesn’t fit comforta-
bly into any particular school or movement, but somehow seems
integral to many of them. At any given time, there are at least three
things going on at once. There is a fraught, crackling surface, a
combination of painting, scraping, and the unevenness inherent in
hand-developing. Lines and sprocket holes frequently bob up the
side of the image. And then there’s something moving within the
image, a representation that involves something—trains, a wom-
an washing clothes, a landscape—travelling across the screen. So
Barnett is activating the horizontal, vertical, and surface vectors
of the cinema image at any given time.
White Heart also experiments with loops, such as the afore-
mentioned trains, seen in a city intersection from a high window.
It is hard to discern at first that parts of the image are repeating,
because the surface information that accompanies those repeti-
tions—the pockmarks and peels—is completely unique upon each
iteration. There is also the repeated use of the word “rose,” which
eventually seems to refer to the flower, as expected, but through
its repetition can take on a multitude of meanings: the image rose
higher; objects are arranged in rows; and even several shots of the
ocean imply that someone rows, rows, rows their boat.
This is an open-form film, and it contains bits that don’t have
obvious connections to the whole. In particular, Barnett returns
several times to an older man in a library, an academic type who of-
fers erudite narration. His relatively straightforward appearance
seems at odds with the heavily worked-over surfaces of so much
of White Heart, such that he is like a voice from outside, an Owen
Landian commentator. Similarly, we see a close-up of fingers hold-
ing a match, sometimes lit, sometimes not, as if prepared to burn
the entire film from the inside out. It would take multiple viewings
to fully grasp everything that Barnett is up to here. White Heart is
a film that gestures outward, as opposed to structural films that
point towards their own internal forms and conclusions.
This sense of dispersion continues into the present day, I dis-
covered, with Barnett’s latest film, Science Without Substance,
a feature-length work that was begun in the ’70s and completed
this year with contemporary digital technology. It shares with
Greenaway a commitment to layering and density that goes well
beyond what a human being could reasonably be expected to grasp
on first pass. It is a dense collage of sonic clips, found images, and
original performance material. On its surface, there is a constant
flashing of the video raster, implicating the viewer in the distinc-
tion between analogue (film) and digital (video) media and their
integration during the process of perception.
There are moments of pure light and colour, but mostly there
is an overwhelming sense of movement and confusion. There
are recurring tracking shots out a train window, treated to make

the houses look post-nuclear. These images are accompanied by
(at the beginning) a 300-to-zero countdown and (at the end) a
one-to-100 “count-up.” But above all there are individuals rifling
through forests of discarded newspapers, magnifying portions in
search of who knows what. This is compared with shots of comput-
er-generated gobbledygook and audio clips about transformation
and “waking up a different person.” Science Without Substance,
over the course of its difficult journey, thematizes the struggle to
understand one’s world, and is in many ways about the choice that
its own viewer must make when confronting it: try to build a sys-
tem for tentative comprehension, or embrace the chaos.
As I was watching the new film, I got the beginnings of an idea for
a filmic category or descriptor. We could call it cinema bombardier,
a kind of absolute opposite to minimalism or slow cinema. Barnett
is a practitioner, along with other folks who have not gotten their
historical due, like David Larcher, Mike Cartmell, Michele Smith,
Bruce Elder, and, perhaps to a lesser extent, Pat O’Neill. (One of the
only bombardiers who has met with something resembling popu-
lar acclaim, although not from the avant-garde film world, is Ryan
Trecartin.) These filmmakers seem to overwhelm the viewer with
more visual and sonic information than anyone could ever possi-
bly process, and if one goes in unprepared, the experience can be
rather unpleasant. It’s a bit like flunking an exam in real time: you
know you’re supposed to be “getting” something, but there’s too
much coming at you, and in too complex a format.
But this is actually the point. These works are precisely about
the incapacity of the human mind to make sense of highly complex
systems, and so several things happen as we watch. We can let the
whole thing wash over us like atonal art music—we will perceive
themes and motifs, overall rhythms, but the micro-relationships
will most likely elude us, especially on a single viewing. Or, we
can try to organize the waves of data into broad categories, which
Science Without Substance
means ignoring lots of surface details and instead focusing on pat-
terns of colour, texture, light and dark pulsing, the use of text as
text rather than as signification, etc. Or, we can concentrate very
hard on what’s in front of us—all of it—for small moments, and
then pull our rapt attention away for resting periods, resulting in
waves of broad impressionism and select moments of careful nota-
tion of the smaller articulations.
I don’t like when writers on experimental cinema remark that
a film is “challenging” or “not for everyone,” mostly because such
proclamations carry a faint whiff of machismo. But at the same
time, Science Without Substance asks its viewer to meet it more
than halfway, and it doesn’t offer up simple pleasures. I imagine
it will be hard to program, despite its obvious mastery. But at the
same time, it represents a strain of experimental practice that is too
often ignored by most of the gatekeepers of the avant-garde. Some
would simply dismiss Barnett’s film as “unwatchable.” However, as
Debord predicted, more and more of our world is indeed painfully
watchable; the demand that we watch is a form of labour extracted
from us daily. (Whether we see is a different matter.)
Straub and Huillet once claimed that they were making films
for spectators who did not yet exist. The Warholian spectator, and
that viewer stationed at all points around the Tarkovsky Ring, is
fully formed. The spectator who may not exist is the one who sub-
mits to utter confusion and assault, who acclimates him or herself
to the bafflement of the spectacular present, but within an en-
framed, aesthetic context where new competencies can be devel-
oped. Allowing oneself to be overwhelmed is not to place oneself at
the mercy of insidious ideologies. The cinema of bombardment is
a calculus of strenuous perception, an exercise of beauty as high-
er-level data processing, the joy of getting lost and then gradually
finding our way out of the desert. These films bombard us in order
to see what sticks.
35
Naked in Paris
Nadav Lapid on Synonyms

BY ROBERT KOEHLER
Like an alien dropping out of the sky, Yoav, the hero of Nadav
Lapid’s Synonyms, is introduced as a being without a home, a
purpose, or even clothes. As he scrambles naked around a va-
cant Parisian apartment, his strong, lean, athletic body miti-
gates his desperate situation: it’s the body of someone who could
possibly survive anything. It’s also the body of the incredible
new actor Tom Mercier, who has never acted before in cine-
ma. As if out of a fairy tale, Yoav luckily has a couple, would-be
writer Emile (Quentin Dolmaire) and orchestra oboist Caroline
(Louise Chevillotte), take him in. Charming yet harsh, friend-
ly yet unhinged, Yoav emerges as something close to a Holy
Fool, a cousin to Nagel, the lonely eccentric of Knut Hamsun’s
Mysteries. He wants to completely shed his Israeli identity and
become French—how he even got to Paris remains a mystery—
but the only way he knows how is to randomly flip through pages
in his French dictionary and read words, then mouth all their
synonyms. He chants these synonyms while walking the city

36
streets, and a disinterested observer could assume that Yoav is
completely mad.
He is, in fact, surviving as best he can, reaching out to grab
onto words as if they’re buoys in a stormy sea. Words also dom-
inated Lapid’s second feature, The Kindergarten Teacher (2014),
in which the title character displays an increasingly obsessive
and destructive interest in one of her five-year-old students
(also named Yoav), whose spare and visionary poetry seems
far beyond his years. (In fact, the poems derive from ones that
Lapid himself wrote around that age.) Putting aside its dark
examination of pedagogical attentiveness and poetic sensitivi-
ty curdling into something awful, the film dramatizes the pure
power of words to express thought and define the self. It’s not
such a leap from the Tel Aviv classroom of one little Yoav to the
Paris street maze of a bigger, stronger, and more disturbed Yoav.
The same Yoav, then, in a different body? No—the Yoav of
Synonyms is, as Lapid points out, “not vulgar, he’s poetic in a
way,” but he’s no prodigy. Yoav is a young man trying to escape
from a condition of what might be called “Israeliness,” what
Lapid has previously identified as a “hermetic way of looking at
the world” in which “we are in permanent danger and it creates a
perfect order.” But in his carefully crafted narrative, whose hel-
ter-skelter surface deceptively appears as chaotic as Yoav him-
self, Lapid holds back on any social or political causes for Yoav’s
state of mind and behaviour. In this, Synonyms is quite the op-
posite of The Kindergarten Teacher and, especially, Lapid’s first
film, Policeman (2011), which stands as one of the most powerful
and indelible debuts in 21st-century cinema. In that burning
firecracker of a movie, two hard sides of Israeli society—tough,
military-trained cops and a bold circle of left-wing militants
driven to terrorism—face off for a terrifying confrontation that
leaves everyone burned. It remains, full-stop, the most savage
societal self-examination to emerge from Israeli cinema, some-
thing almost impossible to top; Lapid’s subsequent classroom
character study was a smart gambit, turning things down a few
notches even as he produced similarly disturbing results.
Nevertheless, the diagnosis in both films was the same: Lapid
considers his homeland to be in a dire, sick condition, in need
of shock treatment to stir it from the slow-motion process of
its own destruction from within. His filmmaking is so pow-
erfully charged, so utterly confident, so in command of its re-
sources and outcomes, that every one of his upcoming projects
is naturally anticipated and freighted with high expectations.
In his 2015 review of The Kindergarten Teacher for Tablet, J.
Hoberman reported on Lapid’s plans for Synonyms, that it would
be a story about an Israeli who leaves the country “to heal him-
self from the Israeli sickness and to become French,” and then
made the fairly bold prediction that, because the sickness is
existential in nature, that “Lapid’s protagonist will leave Israel
only to become more Israeli.”
This is part of the movie’s surprise: Yoav doesn’t become more
Israeli, but boy does he ever get existential. Perhaps the perfect
movie act to be set in the city of Sartre, the work of Lapid’s cam-
era and Mercier’s untethered instincts as a performer express
the essence of what it is to be in the present moment and to find
meaning in that. Along with this, of course, there must be a
practice, and Yoav—once he manages to get a set of clothes cour-
tesy of his Parisian saviours—sets about diving into his French
dictionary and mouthing only French, French all the time, all
day, all night, and never mind if you don’t want to hear him: he’s
going to keep talking until your ears fall off. French isn’t just
French in Synonyms—it’s a way of being, a liberation unto itself.
The attentive cinephile may draw a connection between
Lapid and Eugène Green, who left the US for France and be-
came so French that he refused to ever speak English and in-
sists that his first name be pronounced with the proper French
accent. But Yoav’s is a different exile story from Green’s, even
while it shares the quality of the outsider willingly seduced by
the music and rhythms of the French language. Yoav is a body
of raw material who builds himself up from pure nakedness,
like a sculptor finding the form inside a slab of stone, and part of
this construction is providing Emile with the stories that Emile
struggles to find on his own. Where does this come from? The
mystery of Yoav is gradually revealed through a chain of unex-
pected, nearly indescribable incidents and encounters, ranging
from wild wrestling matches with security dudes at the Israeli
embassy (where Yoav hilariously picks up odd jobs) to the single
weirdest depiction of porn-videomaking in recent cinema. The
stories Yoav generates for Emile come from a life that started
back home, which we finally see in the movie’s final third when
Lapid deposits us back in Israel, where military training ap-
pears to be more unhinged than anything in M*A*S*H (1970)
and shame and embarrassment are all part of the package for
a soldier. These scenes pointedly veer far from Policeman’s dis-
plays of machismo: for all his physical ability, Yoav seems like
a man-child in these scenes, recalling the wet-behind-ears re-
cruits of Full Metal Jacket (1987) who sense they’re marching
straight into hell. You’d want to run away from this too.
It’s safe to say that, for all of Lapid’s protean skills, Synonyms
wouldn’t be what it is without Mercier. When the camera rolls
and it’s shooting actors, a movie project falls completely into
the hands of the performers; the next scene can’t be shot until
the performance in the current scene is right. This reality con-
founds the myths of auteurism, and Synonyms happily depends
on its lead actor to deliver the goods. Mercier projects a feral
intensity, a boundless energy that’s frightening in its freedom,
something that possibly comes from a young artist who doesn’t
recognize the conventional codes of movie acting, or any kind of
acting. You must go back to the early days of the Wooster Group
and, even earlier, to Jerzy Grotowski’s theatre ensembles to find
this sort of utter abandon that nevertheless maintains a certain
control. Yoav isn’t Israeli or French: he simply becomes Tom
Mercier, and Tom Mercier becomes him. Lapid is acute enough
to know that he has caught lightning in a bottle.
Cinema Scope: Synonyms appears to be constructed so that it
resists any kind of classification or categorization. What was the
beginning point for this project?
Nadav Lapid: It started for me with the idea that the life and
the future of someone are dictated in unexpected ways by the
37
words he finds accidentally in a dictionary. It’s the words that
dictate what’s going on. They don’t describe. The words are cho-
sen on a verbal basis. When I lived in Paris like Yoav—that ex-
perience is the basis of the story—I wanted to stop being Israeli
and become French, abandon what I knew and reinvent myself.
French became a pathway for redemption, and each word I
studied was a kind of triumph over my past. I was very lonely
and trying to memorize the French dictionary. I didn’t have the
opportunities to practice my French on people since I didn’t
really know anyone. Once I met someone, I was throwing all
these words at him in order to make my vocabulary richer. So,
I used a system of synonyms. The topics of our conversations
were based on the most recent words I had studied that day, or
the words I wanted to practice. For instance, if I had been read-
ing the various words for storms, I would call these out for this
guy and that’s what we would talk about. That scene with Yoav
talking about natural disasters comes directly from that. It was
a strange reality. But this sense of accidental words becoming
a key to unlock awareness, knowledge, and consciousness fas-
cinated me. When you think about movies or dramatic pieces
of art, they advance generally through a series of psychological
consequences and events. But here, in this movie, the thing that
makes the story is the act of accidentally turning a page in a
French dictionary. It’s also connected to this idea that interests
me in art, the tension between the deliberately planned and the
arbitrary. I wanted to create a movie that would take a certain
situation and then accidents could happen to affect it.
Scope: There can be the perception that Yoav is mad, or at
least verging on madness. And yet as you describe the genesis,
his actions aren’t mad, but are based on survival and a kind of
strategy through language to connect.
Lapid: I would answer on several levels. There’s something
very reasonable about his system, because he realizes running
away from his greatest enemy won’t be sufficient, as he carries
the demon inside him. In a way, the most tangible presence of
this demon is a verbal one, because Hebrew is a language that’s
peculiar to Israelis and connected to very ancient sources, so
if you want to run away from it, you can’t. It has a magic spell
on you. This problem wouldn’t happen to an American guy, say,
who wanted to become French and speak French. He stops us-
ing Hebrew and he’s a grown man without words, like a baby, so
he has to find new words. We can see that his words are essential
and important to his future. But I can also recall this moment of
pronouncing syllables in French. There’s a different melody in
French, and I found that my tongue could pronounce new vow-
els and words. We endlessly debate human capacity for change
and adapting versus determinism, whether we’re born and die
without really ever changing. Now I found that I was changing,
and this became an optimistic moment for me because now I
was experiencing something very concrete: these new words
and verbal melody were mine.
Scope: You hold back Yoav’s background with his parents
and in the military from the viewer until late into the movie.
You have variations on this kind of revelation process in The
Kindergarten Teacher and Policeman, but you do it more radi-
38
cally here. The effect, especially in the movie’s first half, is as if
Yoav is an alien creature deposited on the Paris streets.
Lapid: It’s an excellent way to describe that. That’s because
Synonyms is not a film about consequences and doesn’t ask the
viewer to watch the cause and the motive, and then watch the
consequences. It’s a film about being and existence. And some
of the elements of existence are memories from the past, visions
from the past, music from the past, feelings from the past. But
it doesn’t mean that you can’t explain and explore meanings of
present behaviour by laying out the past. These visions of the
past are always related to storytelling, and by telling it you’re
reconstructing it. Yoav himself is making this choice to re-
veal past moments that reveal something about himself to his
French friends at a certain moment pretty late in the story.
The moments are aesthetic and the choices of a guy who stud-
ied French based on certain words that he memorized and was
looking for an opportunity to use. It’s aesthetic because there’s
a cinematic beauty when he notices that someone is playing an
instrument that looks like a machine gun. The protagonist him-
self is playing with his life, and playing by telling his friends and
using his French vocabulary and his bodily gestures. I didn’t
want to limit Yoav to the present. I wanted him to dig into his
past. At the same time, it’s not only a playful game. With some
things, when you touch them or when you pronounce the word
naming it, an emotional dimension can open up. Even if it starts
in a playful aesthetical way, the film is also connected to emo-
tional realities.
Scope: This is a way of giving Yoav agency and ensuring that
he’s the storyteller. It’s interesting that he has this relationship
with this creative French couple—though between them, we
suspect that Caroline is by far the more accomplished and gen-
uine artist, while Emile comes off as a kind of literary poseur—
since they come from the elite class. In a sense, Yoav is feeding
Emile stories that the writer can’t come up with himself. Yoav is
like some kind of narrative machine.
Lapid: Yeah, yeah, he’s a narrative machine. With everything
that happens, he translates it quickly to a story. Sometimes his
stories are harsh, but he isn’t morally or psychologically con-
scious to the meaning of his stories. He seems to be interested
only in the action of the storytelling. He describes his efforts to
take exams to become an officer, how he ultimately failed be-
cause he couldn’t react when he saw the images of a kid playing
the violin and the kid turns and points the violin and it’s a ma-
chine gun. In a way, you can tell yourself, well, what’s the conclu-
sion? Maybe it’s that I was so obsessed with guns, and couldn’t
accept the presence of beauty. He doesn’t reflect on the story’s
meaning. He’s only interested in the act of telling the story.
Scope: He’s kind of like Hollywood.
Lapid: It’s true.
Scope: There’s an even more explicit connection between
music and weapons in the flashback scene where he’s firing his
machine gun to the beat of Pink Martini’s “Sympathique (Je ne
veux pas travailler).” It seems you deliberately connect the im-
age of the boy with the machine gun-violin and the firing-range
scene, which in turn subvert the Israeli military ethos. It’s
Strangelovian. Which is a recurring theme in your work of a par-
ticular Israeli military and police-state attitude and complex,
and that you address in a way no other Israeli filmmaker accom-
plishes. You don’t do it head on. You do it with a sense of comedy.
Lapid: Yeah, it turns the whole thing into a cabaret. Instead
of a tough Israeli man of war, Yoav becomes a French chanteuse
out of Toulouse-Lautrec. On one hand, there are several Israeli
movies that have a concrete critique of the military and soldiers,
their behaviour at checkpoints, the way they treat Arabs. But I
declare war on the essence of the Israeli soul. In this sense, it’s
much more profound and radical. I try to inquire what has be-
come of Israelis after living all these years in their land. From
this point of view, the criticism isn’t about some political rem-
edy: it’s about the collective soul. But I also think that the mise
en scène of my movies is full of joy and beauty and tries to be
hilarious. Israelis can be hilarious, joyful, and beautiful. People
say that my films can be ambiguous and full of love and hate, and
in a way I agree, but it’s not really that. Ideologically, it provides
a collision between the content and the form, between what you
understand in this scene and what you see.
This idea leads to something very interesting that happened
when the film was released two weeks after it won the Golden
Bear in Berlin. We currently have a very repressive minister of
culture, who wants to censor and limit criticism of Israel. This
same minister delivered a congratulatory message to me but
also noted that she didn’t know if the film violated Israeli laws of
what can be depicted onscreen, and if the comments on Israelis
in the film are permissible. Once it premiered, the minister sent
her closest political person to examine these questions, and
to apparently see if the film is “anti-Israeli.” I was informed of
this and told them good luck and that I myself don’t know if it’s
“anti-Israeli.” So he went to the premiere and we never heard
anything from him. We imagined what it must have been like for
him to go to the minister’s office afterwards and try to describe
the movie to her! I mean, what is it? It must’ve been a brilliant,
funny scene to have this bureaucrat try to explain it. The Golden
Bear win was received with an amazing amount of attention in
Israel. The top three broadcasters interrupted their news pro-
grams to announce the Berlin prize. It was the sort of thing I im-
agined would happen when a war breaks out. For me there was
something very moving about it, since it showed the thirst and
desire in the country to be recognized for normal achievement.
Not only for the best bombs and weapons, but also art.
Scope: Did the novels of Knut Hamsun—I’m thinking especial-
ly of Mysteries—influence the making of Synonyms? There are a lot
of echoes between his solitary holy fool and Yoav in Paris.
Lapid: You’re a genius. I was writing the script with my fa-
ther, who’s a writer, and we were discussing a lot the main
character in Mysteries. It was a source of great inspiration for
us. This endless way to surprise, and to stay mysterious, with
a mixture of being charming, and also an incapacity to be part
of something. Yoav is a kind of hero who’s incapable of entering
into society and can only be on the other side of the closed door
trying to get in. We discussed these issues and how they went
back to Hamsun’s novel. It was a very present novel for me dur-
ing the writing.
Scope: That closed door at the end seemed like the perfect
ending, since he’s still trying to get inside France and yet he
can’t. Just before that conclusion, the film dwells intensively on
Yoav’s efforts to understand French national identity. You re-
39
veal a complicated attitude toward France and the French. On
one hand, he’s yelling at Emile through the door that he doesn’t
know how lucky he is to be French, and yet he recites the blood-
thirsty lyrics of “La Marseillaise.” They’re shocking. And he re-
cites the lyrics almost as if he’s storming the Bastille.
Lapid: I get many shocked reactions at this. When I read the
lyrics I was shocked myself. The French treat “La Marseillaise”
in a blasé way that can dilute its impact and violence, but the
way Yoav sings it, it’s as if he’s a soldier in the French Revolution.
It’s like when he shouts at Caroline that he came to save her, that
the Republic is sinking. I think Yoav wants to return France to
its prior state of revolution, a kind of boiling state. Singing “La
Marseillaise” this way I can tell you makes it sound ten times
more violent than any Israeli hymn.
Scope: Yoav’s militancy is countered by his Israeli security
colleague, who has this completely different response to con-
ditions in Europe as an Israeli Jew. You dramatize this with
him getting into everyone’s face on the Metro and humming
the Israeli anthem. They’re the two responses to being an
Israeli Jew in Europe right now. Given these polar opposites,
are you feeling closer to Yoav, or separated from both of them?
Especially since you no longer live in France.
Lapid: Yeah, I’m definitely closer to Yoav. There’s this Jewish
attitude toward the Diaspora: we say that Jews in the Diaspora
would never read a Hebrew book in a public space. Being Israeli
means that you carry it with pride and if someone asks you,
you answer, “I’m Israeli, do you have a problem with that?”
This guy expresses something in a confrontational way that a
lot of Israelis feel. He’s desperately looking for anti-Semites.
Even worse, he’s totally convinced that all Europeans are anti-
Semites, and you just have to push the right button to prove it.
The situation is depicted as comical, but the film is also seen
through the gaze of Yoav. He’s the hero. After all, he’s compared
to Hector, his childhood hero. At the end, he profits from the
grief of being the Beautiful Loser. When he’s dragged on the
road, as Yoav imagines it, just like Hector, there’s a heroic ten-
derness about him that comes to the surface.
Scope: This runs directly counter to the image of the soldier-
victor. He seems to find purpose in his role and identity as a loser.
Lapid: Totally. In a way, he’s expressing something extreme.
But when we see him alongside the Israeli security guys at the
embassy, they appear to be vulgar. And Yoav is not vulgar. He’s
poetic in a way. The only way to deal with his heritage is to go to
polar extremes. But it’s never vulgar.
Scope: Sure, you’re aware that those security guys could nev-
er possibly relate to Emile and Caroline the way Yoav can. He
has this other creative French world.
Lapid: Absolutely. I felt that the film has this element of leg-
end. The Israeli Prince running away from his homeland and
himself and he arrives from Hell into Paradise. Like Candide,
who arrives in the Best of All Possible Worlds. He wakes up na-
ked like a baby; the film begins that way, like a fairy tale.
Scope: Which brings us to the astonishing performance
of Tom Mercier. Where did you find him? He has a powerfully
physical presence, which you emphasize.
40
Lapid: I found him in normal casting. He was a student in
acting school, and this was his first film. The first time he was
on set was when he’s running naked around the apartment in
the opening sequence. He shocked us from the start. I’ve never
seen such a thing. He’s an extremely strange creature, the way
he passes from one mental state to another. He’s the most se-
rious person I’ve ever seen. He’s a hard worker. Very devoted,
concentrated on himself, and, at the same time, kind of crazy,
without recognizing any limitations on what’s possible. He can
be lying on the floor, totally naked with a finger up his ass, and
think that this isn’t a more complicated thing for him to do than
walk down the street. If you asked him if it was hard to do these
scenes, he’d look at you a bit puzzled, maybe comment on the
difficulty of the text, but doing it? No problem. He’s the gentlest,
most polite person, and also full of violence. This mixture that
you see in the movie is extremely powerful. He was the Israeli
youth champion in judo and projected to be an Olympic con-
tender. At 17, he abandoned judo for dance, just like that. So he
already had this mixture of tenderness and violence. Watching
him running around naked is like watching a classical Greek
statue in the Louvre coming alive.
Scope: Along with this tremendous physical base that he has
in his body, Mercier also shows an incredible verbal capacity.
Some of his line deliveries come close to rap. A more experi-
enced actor would have played it safer with this role, and you
sense that this unlimited quality can only come from an actor
who’s totally fearless because he’s totally new.
Lapid: It’s so true. He lacks this classical dramatic process
and training. He’s totally open. It’s interesting that you men-
tion rap, because rap was a guide for me. When Yoav is pro-
nouncing these words and going through them, I asked Tom to
listen to rap music. I think rap does something close to cinema.
I love this idea that at the end there’s something naked, so that
in rap you end up without music, and you have just the human
voice speaking directly to the listener. In a way, at the end of
my movies, there’s a white wall and a person existing in front
of you. The movie’s basis is simple and rough and extreme, but
then it puts on all these clothes, the narration, the sub-stories,
and the other characters. And then I feel that ultimately some-
thing happens in all my movies where they aspire to get naked,
to go back to this genesis, the basis. And at moments, it realizes
this liberation from being considered “a movie” and becomes the
thing itself.
Scope: Do you think you get closest to that state with
Synonyms?
Lapid: I think so. There’s something in the movie that, first
of all, is connected to the unclassifiable thing you mentioned.
There’s also this construction of someone arriving naked in a
foreign place, going through it, and having to leave. And yet
there’s a big part of the movie in which the drama is very slim—
it might be just about a person trying to learn French. The
movie is trying to shed the disguise of a “normal movie” with
a “normal protagonist.” You need this disguise for a while, but
if you fully respect the essence of the film, the disguise must
be annihilated.
 Untitled 77-A

Together We’re Willing

to Take Any Risk
The Films of Han Ok-hee and Kaidu Club

BY JESSE CUMMING

“There are two prejudices in pre-existing
cinema: filmmaking is a male job and the mov-
ie should be fun. We, as outsiders, will break
these biases.”
—Han Ok-hee, 1974
In 1974, a group of students from the prestigious Ewha Womans
University in Seoul formed South Korea’s first feminist film col-
lective, Kaidu Club. Shepherded by the group’s de-facto president
Han Ok-hee, the other members—who participated with varying
degrees of involvement over the Club’s five years of existence—also
included the painter Kim Jeom-seon, as well as academics and
artists Lee Jeong-hee, Han Soon-ae, Jeong Myo-sook, and Wang
Gyu-won. As the “Club” designation might suggest, the group was
committed to both the promotion and production of experimental
cinema, which was still in its domestic infancy. Both elements in-
formed the Club’s official debut in July 1974, when they organized
the country’s first experimental film festival on the roof of Seoul’s
Shinsegae department store and presented their own works along-
side films by peers Kim Jum-sun, Yi Jeong-hee, and the American
Ed Emshwiller. A similar model was replicated, with even more
emphasis on the Club’s own productions, in the 1975 and 1977 iter-
ations of this short-lived but important event.
Kaidu Club was one of several collectively minded constella-
tions of artists and filmmakers that populated South Korea’s cul-
tural landscape in the late ’60s and early ’70s, including visual-art
collectives like The A.G. (or Avant-garde) Group, the  Shin Jun
Group, and the Fourth Group. (The latter included Kim Ku-lim,
who directed The Meaning of 1/24 Second, the 1969 short often
considered South Korea’s first experimental film.) More dedicat-

41
ed film collectives included the early trendsetters Cine-Poem and
Kaidu Club affiliates Moving Image Research Group, who present-
ed early projects by Han in 1973, the year before the official forma-
tion of Kaidu Club and the experimental film festival.
The somewhat nebulous and interdisciplinary nature of Kaidu
Club—which at various points also went by the name  Kaidu
Experimental Film Research Society, to designate their more
academically oriented projects—is reflected in its cinematic out-
put. While their filmography includes a number of collectively
authored works, the majority of the Club’s projects were released
under Han’s name, with other members contributing to the pro-
duction on the periphery. Rope (1974) was one such film, signed
by Han and presented at the 1974 festival. While a number of the
group’s projects touch on themes of separation and isolation, Rope
is one of Han’s most technically and formally contained piec-
es, constructed primarily out of single-frame animations of the
eponymous object choreographed on top of a sheet in a studio.
The manipulated rope—which can variously be read as a noose,
an umbilical cord, or a film strip—is regularly accompanied by a
collection of other squirming, shimmying objects (paddles, nets,
pans, shoes, a soccer ball, an umbrella, a ladder, and more), as well
as the body of the filmmaker and her impressionistic shadow. The
film also incorporates fragments of documentary footage captured
on the streets of Seoul, frequently sutured with playful associative
montage, such as cutting from a net to fish in a market stall, or a
close-up of the rope to a live snake. The film’s final moments are
its most frenetic, with blurred, chaotic camera movements accent-
ed by splotches of blue paint floating on the surface of the black-
and-white footage.
Kaidu Club emerged less than five years after Kim’s The Meaning
of 1/24 Second, and it’s easy to see traces of the excitement and
pointed experimentation of Kim’s dynamic film in Rope and a
number of Han and Kaidu Club’s shorts—particularly its rapid-
fire approach to assemblage and juxtaposition, an ambivalent re-
lationship to the modernizing city of Seoul, and a decidedly DIY,
freeform style that incorporates themes of industry, art, culture,
politics, and commerce through an ambitious mix of documenta-
ry, animation, and flashes of a surrealist narrative.
While Han’s earliest films most often build upon the language
of experimental film, the 1975 short 2minutes40seconds (which
in fact runs a little over 10 minutes) more immediately embraces
documentary. Across its runtime, the filmmaker(s) assemble an
associative montage of moments that reflect contemporary life
and culture in South Korea, with the still relatively fresh parti-
tioning of the nation a central theme.  As with Han’s other films,
the editing is swift, and traditional elements—temples, prayer, art,
woodworking, and more—are set against more banal, quotidian
material of animals, sports, and children playing, as well as imag-
es of construction sites and other harbingers of modernity. There
are flourishes of  traditional avant-garde aesthetics throughout,
such as near-abstract compositions of  building materials and
light on water, or technical plays with focus and shifting exposure
rates. Wordless, the film is set to a booming score and occasion-
ally heightened foley. One of the few motifs and repeated images
is that of a barbed-wire fence, and each appearance appropriately
42
serves to halt the film’s steady flow of images, if only for a moment.
For a film that is positioned as a  paean to citizens who dream of
a united North and South Korea, the final result is appropriately
cumulative, and the mosaic-like assemblage emerges as a rich time
capsule greater than the sum of its individual parts.
Hole (1974) is one of Kaidu Club’s most enduring works, and
proof of their multifaceted approach to filmmaking. The group’s
interdisciplinary arts background is evidenced in the opening
moments, which offer details of abstract paintings before shifting
to a loose narrative about a young man who escapes from a pris-
on cell into the metropolis before ultimately deciding to return.
In lieu of dialogue or voiceover, the sound design is a mix of elec-
tronic compositions, surf rock, psychedelic funk, heavy breath-
ing, and other audio effects. Visually the film is equally dynamic,
notably for the way it interpolates and reworks multiple eras of
experimental-cinema style into something distinct and specific,
variously  incorporating ’60s and ’70s materialist manipulations
and other technical plays with solarization alongside Dutch an-
gles and mysterious glimpses of hands reaching out from and over
walls, images that wouldn’t look out of place in Dimitri Kirsanoff’s
Ménilmontant (1926) or a ’40s Hollywood psychodrama. While one
suspects Han and the group may have had exposure to similarly
maximalist experimental work by  their Japanese contemporar-
ies Terayama Shuji and Matsumoto Toshio, the film’s Western in-
fluence is cemented by the end card (“FIN”), a testament to the in-
fluence of foreign culture available from local screening venues at
the time, the history of which has been explored by scholars Oh
Junho, Park Nohchool, and others. 
Less official than any of the organized collectives active at the
time was the loose group of cinephiles and intellectuals who pop-
ulated screenings hosted by key cultural institutions in Seoul
that permitted vital and influential exposure to international
art cinema, including the Goethe-Institut, the French Cultural
Centre, and the United States Information Service. It’s here that
any discussion of Kaidu Club, their activities, and their artwork
serves to be further situated in the context of ’70s Korean film
culture, which is frequently considered the “dark ages” in most
studies of Korean cinema, situated between the golden age of the
’60s and the New Korean Cinema movement of the ’90s. The dec-
ade was profoundly marked by the cultural policies of dictator
Park Chung-hee, who had been the nation’s president since 1961.
With the 1973 solidification of Park’s powers through the Yu-shin
Constitution, the nation’s censorship laws were rewritten and
strengthened, leading to tighter restrictions on content and more
rigorous vetting of both scripts and finished films. These measures
also informed the era’s commercial exhibition standards, with
limitations on foreign films as well as independent shorts, forcing
the need for alternative screening venues like the aforementioned
cultural centres, cafés, and more. 
Whether or not its popularity can be attributed to the impor-
tance of the Goethe-Institut, different scholars also note the prev-
alence and importance of the 1962 Oberhausen Manifesto for sev-
eral of the groups and artists active in the Seoul scene of the ’60s
and ’70s. Penned and signed by a number of German filmmakers
(among them Alexander Kluge, Edgar Reitz, and Haro Senft) as a
rebuke of their national commercial cinema, the text has errone-
ously been cited as declaring “papa’s cinema is dead.” It’s notable
that this misconception made its way to Korea, however, given
the slogan’s affinity with the principles of Han and Kaidu Club,
who positioned their work against the patriarchal mainstream
cinema that dominated their country’s film culture. Such antag-
onism was also explicitly directed against “Chungmuro,” a do-
mestic place-name shorthand for the commercial film industry (à
la “Hollywood”). 
In particular, 1974 proved to be a major year for Korean film
history, one where we can identify divergent stylistic forms that
would influence the rest of the decade as well as later national cin-
ematic developments, particular in terms of the representation of
women. On the one hand is the release of Lee Jang-ho’s Heavenly
Homecoming to Stars, at that point the highest-grossing Korean
film of all time. An important entry in the genre of “hostess films”
that dominated the ’70s commercial industry—“hostess” being a
general stand-in for “prostitute”—the films shared connections
with the Western “fallen women” films of decades prior, their plots
typically laden with sexual violence and tragic endings. Scholar Yu
Sun-young’s research into cinema of the “dark ages” stunningly re-
veals that “hostess or sex workers accounted for 87.5% of all female
characters in films produced from 1971 to 1979.” While the reputa-
tion of Lee’s film and certain other hostess films have shifted over
time, with some critics lauding what they see as a particular class
consciousness, the films, the industry that produced them, and the
policies that permitted their dominance were all targets of Kaidu
Club’s criticism.
One of the later Han Ok-hee films produced during her associa-
tion with Kaidu Club was Untitled 77-A (1977), a playful but load-
ed  self-portrait of the artist as a stifled creative, and one of her
few works to explicitly foreground a woman protagonist. The film
opens with Han in a darkened studio, trimming 35mm film with
scissors before splicing, assembling, and eventually projecting the
fragments. Much of the projected film consists of yellow-tinted
material, again presented as impressionistic collage. Like the ear-
lier films, we see a mix of observational footage of pedestrians,
artists, sports, and more, but here the footage also features Han
and other filmmakers within the crowds, cameras raised to their
eyes or, in one moment, laid on Han’s lap as she sits, slumped, in a
city square.
Between these quick flashes, the film returns repeatedly to Han
and her studio as she drapes reels of celluloid over her body and
plays with her scissors, including snipping dramatically in front
of a projector beam in a pseudo-expanded cinema performance.
Eventually the film takes a turn for the macabre, as the scissors
puncture a white wall and produce a mysterious stream-turned-
splatter of fake blood.  If the film displays the sense of darkness,
frustration, and claustrophobia that also informs Hole and ele-
ments of 2minutes40seconds, the final moments serve to rupture
the atmosphere, as the darkened room is illuminated and Han is
joined by a smiling collaborator to pronounce the film’s sole word
(in English): “Cut!”
Although Kaidu Club splintered towards the end of the ’70s, its
influence and importance are evident in the cinematic renaissance
Untitled 77-A
in the post-Park Chung-hee ’80s and ’90s, an era which not only
saw the emergence of a new generation of feminist filmmakers,
but also vital documentary practices. Likewise, the groundwork
laid by the group’s early forays into exhibition appear as obvious
precursors to the independent-minded Small Film Festival of the
mid-’80s and the still-active EXiS Experimental Film and Video
Festival. Han, for her part, temporarily relocated to Germany in
the ’80s to undertake further graduate studies, but eventually re-
turned to South Korea and to filmmaking. While never embracing
the mainstream Chungmuro realm the group rallied against, her
work in the ’80s and ’90s was more industrial and commercial,
culminating in the 1993 IMAX film Running Korean, produced as a
promotional film for the 1993 Taejon Expo.
Obviously far from the rough, bric-a-brac nature of Han’s ear-
lier experiments, the film does evince certain shared qualities
with films like 2minutes40seconds  in its  valorization  of Korean
arts and culture, here seen through footage of colourful musical
performances as well as other craft work. (One shot even echoes
the earlier film’s opening and closing, of a Buddhist monk ringing
an enormous bell.) While the few hints of modernity and develop-
ment  seen in her earlier works are trepidatious  and ambivalent,
here Han utilizes montage to link traditional printing techniques
to modern computer science and other technological develop-
ments in a style that is unsurprisingly proud; even the celebration
of Korean art is updated, with textile and pottery work seen along-
side a boyish Nam June Paik as he manipulates his mixed-media
“TV Cello” sculpture. In the film’s penultimate shot, before a run-
ner and a glowing sun, Han returns to a drumming ensemble, with
the camera focused on a tricolour Taegeuk swirl on the drumskin’s
centre, which adds yellow (symbolizing humanity) to the blue and
red of the South Korean flag.  The invocation of the design and
its signification of balance seem fitting for an artist who has long
championed collaborative work, and whose artistic output  has
served to locate and produce harmony out of seemingly disparate
contrasts.
Special thanks to Kim Jiha for her assistance with this article.
43
 Minamata: The Victims and Their World
Land and Sea
Ogawa Shinsuke and Tsuchimoto Noriaki
BY CHRISTOPHER SMALL
“If power oppresses farmers, and if policemen
beat farmers, then our camera will be on the
frontline to receive that beating, so that the
‘message’ of power can be directly conveyed
to the audience through the screen.”
—Ogawa Shinsuke on Narita: Summer in
Sanrizuka (1968)
“We filmed every day and after nearly 140 days
of shooting our memory of each single day is
vivid and precise. What we filmed was not a
daily journal, but the climax of problems that
accumulated while waiting for a solution.”
—Tsuchimoto Noriaki on Minamata: The Victims
and Their World (1972)
44
It is no coincidence that Japan’s two greatest documentarians,
Tsuchimoto Noriaki (1928-2008) and Ogawa Shinsuke (1935-
1992), have long been paired together. There is, most obviously,
their shared biography. In the early ’60s, Ogawa and Tsuchimoto
cut their teeth producing films at Iwanami Productions, a com-
pany specializing in scientific and educational documentaries.
Tsuchimoto was one of the first of their directors to go inde-
pendent in 1965; shortly afterward, Ogawa followed suit and
started his own production company, widely known in Japan
as Ogawa Pro. In 1969, Tsuchimoto directed Prehistory of the
Partisans, a film for Ogawa about student-led opposition to Anpo,
the US-Japan Security Treaty, the vestiges of which are still in
effect today.
What is most striking about the two men’s filmographies when
placed side by side—and doubtless the reason they are so often
discussed in the same breath—is the material link between the
subjects these men repeatedly returned to, and the devotion and
engagement that they brought to producing them. In Ogawa’s case,
his subject was the land—most famously, the decade-long protests
catalyzed by the Japanese government’s attempted expropriation
of peasant land in Sanrizuka, enacted without consultation, in
order to construct what would become the Narita International
Airport. For Tsuchimoto, it was the sea—or, to be more specific,
the poisoning of Minamata Bay and the Shiranui Sea by the fer-
tilizer and chemical corporation Chisso. For three decades, the
company dumped methylmercury waste into the surrounding
rivers and into the bay; this toxin accumulated in the sea life con-
sumed by citizens of nearby towns and villages. They became the
first victims of a devastating neurological syndrome later named
Minamata disease, which debilitated at least 2,265 people and ul-
timately killed 80 percent of them.
Both Ogawa and Tsuchimoto were consumed by these projects
for considerable swathes of their working lives. Ogawa produced
eight films about the struggle at Sanrizuka, spanning a period of
nine years, from the peasant-student coalition’s birth to its even-
tual disintegration and demise at the hands of government forc-
es a decade later. Tsuchimoto produced a dozen Minamata films,
of which today only two, Minamata: The Victims and their World
(1972) and The Shiranui Sea (1975), are widely available. In these
two films alone, Tsuchimoto registers the extent to which the
Chisso corporation’s actions were a profoundly violent assault on
an entire population.
Minamata, the first and more famous of the two films, details
the victims’ hardships with unrelenting rigour. Tsuchimoto’s
camera is startlingly direct in its gaze; he records each moment
as if rescuing and preserving a single, vital piece of evidence.
Text bridges the gaps between scenes, providing useful informa-
tion and imparting little sense of waste. In a rehabilitation ward,
we see blind and deaf children, twisted out of shape by the rav-
ages of the illness, who fail to register the touch of their parents.
Attendants shift them around like they are inanimate; when it
comes time to change their clothes, the children lie helpless on the
floor as their clothes are pulled off them, their arms and legs stick-
ing up in the air like dead spiders. The ward houses victims of both
Minamata disease and cerebral palsy; the physical symptoms can
be similar, though Minamata has severe mental as well as phys-
ical effects. As a teacher observes after giving a lesson in basic
mathematics, “Only half the class understands. The others can
only watch.”
In the first Minamata film, the voices we hear are significantly
desynchronized from the mouths of the speakers, putting a degree
of distance between us and their disquieting confessions. It is as
if Tsuchimoto is wary of the directness he so resolutely believes
the subject calls for, and so prefers that the soundtrack function
as a separate entity in itself. By the time he made The Shiranui Sea,
Tsuchimoto’s anger had evidently dissipated, or at least been pain-
fully internalized, as he has evolved into a more measured and
contemplative filmmaker. Where Minamata has an all-consuming
and disruptive, Ogawa-like intensity to certain of its sequences, in
The Shiranui Sea Tsuchimoto is better able to build scenes like un-
flinching summaries of evidence.
Time and again, Tsuchimoto’s subjects detail the centrality of
the sea to their lives. Minamata begins with the act of fishing—as-
serting an immediate visual link between the mercury poisoning
and the physical action of drawing the net up from the ocean—and
returns to an image a distant, solitary fishing boat rocking with
the waves in its closing images. But there’s a greater clarity to The
Shiranui Sea’s depiction of the actual techniques of the fishermen:
we see each detailed individually, the attention to detail creating
a markedly more disheartening effect as we (and the fishermen)
Sanrizuka: Heta Village
45
know that there is a good chance the fish flopping around on the
deck carry with them the certainty of oblivion. One woman later
says, “I can’t imagine a life without fish…I wonder what message
they are trying to send us.”
In Minamata, the pain of the population is aired in an ex-
traordinary, agonized climactic confrontation with the board of
Chisso. The victims, tired of being ignored and intimidated by
the corporation’s hired thugs, buy stock in the company in order
to attend the annual shareholders’ meeting. In one moment, they
climb the stage and scream in the CEO’s face; in another, as the
board absurdly calls for civility, these citizens stand arm in arm,
staring forward with blank expressions, chanting in unison. For
Tsuchimoto, this mesmerizing sound expresses the anguish of an
entire population.
The Shiranui Sea is more about the victims quietly reflecting
on their lives and on their basic struggle to survive. Gradually,
the film begins to encompass different, more generous forms:
Tsuchimoto even consults the participants as to how they wish to
be filmed, or what direction they want the project to take. In one
amazing sequence, Tsuchimoto appears on screen, speaking with
two of the Minamata victims at the edge of the sea. One confess-
es, her back to the camera, that she derives most of her energy to
keep going in the hope that a brain operation will cure the disease.
Tsuchimoto pauses and quietly informs her that this is unlikely to
happen. She cries. The emotion, unlike in Minamata or the films of
46
Ogawa, where embittered and outraged sentiments are direct and
confrontational, is amplified not in spite of but because the speak-
er is turned away from us. She confesses that, when she looks out
at the ocean, she feels nothing. “Without fishing, we’d all be dead,”
one man tells Tsuchimoto in another scene, while surrounded by
his fisherman friends. After much jovial discussion, each of them
individually discloses that they have begun exhibiting symptoms
of Minamata themselves. In scene after scene, Tsuchimoto amass-
es a watertight case for the inevitability of this collective slide
towards death.
Just as Minamata and Shiranui, in one traumatic encounter
after another, detail the crucial importance of the sea to the peo-
ple of Kyushu Island, so too do Ogawa’s Sanrizuka movies depict
a conflict deeply rooted in the very soil upon which these people
rely. Villagers speak of their disgust at seeing this land abandoned
to the weeds—“It is like seeing my flesh rot,” one woman says. The
first of the Sanrizuka films, Narita: Summer in Sanrizuka (1968),
begins with a watermelon being trampled over by a policeman
in riot gear. An argument breaks out between the farmer whose
watermelon patch is being invaded and the anonymous police,
indifferent to the small- and large-scale destruction and disrup-
tion their presence causes. Our first image of the protracted po-
litical struggle that would come to encompass a decade of clashes
between peasants and government forces, as well as seven more
long films from Ogawa Pro, is thus introduced through a single,
tangible image of damage and disarray inflicted directly on the
products of the land.
Like Tsuchimoto, Ogawa begins with the premise that only the
perspective of the victimized ought to be—even could be—ade-
quately represented. Part of the Sanrizuka films’ staggering con-
frontational approach stems from Ogawa’s scrupulous avoidance
of any psychological insight into the peasants and students as
individuals. Which is not to say that they are depicted as uniform
cogs in an ideological machine: each person elaborates their indi-
vidual perspective at length in moments of strategy and discus-
sion, and any disagreement or division emerges organically from
these interactions. In one such scene, one of the Sanrizuka peas-
ants confesses that at first he distrusted the militant students who
joined them in their struggle: while the farmers were fighting to
meet practical ends—refusing an unjust expropriation of the land
they received after World War II, and which they had broken their
backs to cultivate—the students, he feared, were operating from
an ideological base and therefore had no stake in the game. Even
the most conscientious of liberal filmmakers is often drawn to
such internal divisions as handy devices to stir up drama, but in
Ogawa, there is an intensity of focus derived from these sustained
encounters with real people contemplating real political choices.
In this case, the farmer haltingly confides that the moment he saw
the students battling ferociously and single-mindedly with riot
police—putting their bodies on the line for the sake of the land—
his would-be cause for worry evaporated, and indeed was replaced
by a renewed sense of solidarity.
In rigorously focusing on action, organization, and collective
introspection, Ogawa and his team, like Tsuchimoto, circumvent
the typical trivializing pitfalls of films about protest that atom-
ize groups into divergent and capricious individuals vying for the
spotlight. There is no effort made to analyze each protester as an
actor driven by his or her own psychology, no attention given to
the “other side”—which is to say, the airport construction crews
and the police. There is no question as to which side Ogawa and his
team are on. We only see the police in close-up when they are being
confronted by the protestors, whose pleas for reflection and a sense
of shame are met only by steely indifference. In one sequence, the
film’s principal cameraman is himself beaten and arrested while
recording the violence; after discussing it on camera, the Ogawa
Pro production team confronts the police about the attack, their
vociferous protests met with the same apathetic gazes from be-
hind glass visors. In Sanrizuka: Heta Village (1973), another troop
of impassive policemen arrives in the village to remove the body of
a young man who committed suicide because of the airport, where
they are met by elderly villagers who pace around them and loudly
express their disgust at these footmen of power.
“Why do you do this?” one woman screams at a cop in Narita:
Peasants of the Second Fortress (1971), a film even more shocking
than the first Sanrizuka film. “There are so many other profes-
sions. You may have already killed people.” Where the first film
charted the formation of an autonomous movement and its nas-
cent battle with the forces of oppression, Peasants of the Second
Fortress takes place right at the heart of an ongoing war for self-
determination. In scene after scene, Ogawa’s camera swings wildly
around within the midst of these heroic clashes, bringing a colos-
sal sense of scale to the conflict as the film shifts from perilously
close images of the faces of anguished peasants chained to the bar-
ricades while everything around them descends into chaos to epic
vistas dotted with police squadrons converging like red ants on
the fortresses, waging fierce battle against the enraged protesters.
Equally violent is the sequence in Heta Village where a woman
describes her husband nearly killing her with a machete, swinging
it into the side of her head and hacking at her legs until her screams
finally brought help from a neighbour. “After that, she recovered
and they had eight children,” Ogawa’s dry voiceover informs us.
In this moment, an almost imperceptible shift occurs as Ogawa’s
method moves toward a different model of filmmaking, as individ-
ual violence emerges from personal histories in seeming parallel
the violence of the government. This scene in particular is a tran-
sition point between the other Sanrizuka films, where individual
villagers are shorn of specific psychologies and instead act as ves-
sels for the larger concerns of the collective, and the later, more
languorous films Ogawa produced in Yamagata province.
Ogawa’s filmmaking, like Tsuchimoto’s, requires a recognition
on the part of the audience that all such violent political events are
part of causal chains linking collective thought and collective ac-
tion with the acts and reasoning of individuals. As there is a sense
of scale even within Ogawa’s battle sequences, so too is there em-
bedded in these films’ structures an alternation between prepa-
ration—digging new trenches, rebuilding the fortress, gathering
the collective in the rain to talk strategy—and violence. In the first
scene of Peasants of the Second Fortress, the speakers, a nameless
mix of students and peasant farmers, are engaged and lucid. As
the police gather their forces in the distance, these people gather
behind the barricades they have erected on the land. We witness
some thinking through the plans they work out with one another,
while others coolly observe the formations of riot police gearing
up for another battle. In Ogawa, political thought and organiza-
tion is depicted as an organic flow of ideas between equals in a col-
lective. Each actor has a role to play, such as the older woman in a
headscarf who garrulously holds court among the men and jokes
that she is too fat to be dragged away by the police, by way of insist-
ing that she ought to be central to any plan to barricade the area.
There is no division between men and women in Ogawa’s
Sanrizuka films, as earthy humour forges ironclad bonds across
the gender divide. “We’re all acting together with the same feel-
ing,” says one farmer, and he’s right. In the closing moments of
Summer in Sanrizuka, mothers gather to review their place in the
situation; they dominate the space and discussion completely, and
we see their husbands and their sons listening respectfully. One
mother speaks of her political awakening, her instinctual accept-
ance of the fight ahead. She speaks of a collective fight to which
she never doubted her belonging. There was, she says, an invis-
ible transformation that occurred within her as her fellow farm-
ers began to mobilize. The simplicity of her words comes as one
of the most forcefully political endings ever seen in a film. Ogawa
here ends not with radical action—the films are full of it—but with
the recognition that such things are borne out of a single shift
in perception.
47
 Earth

Occupational Hazard
On Earth and Other Recent Films by Nikolaus Geyrhalter
BY JAY KUEHNER

Scaled for maximum effect, and weighted with tableaux designed

to inspire horrible awe, the latest documentary from Austrian di-
rector Nikolaus Geyrhalter may prove damningly prophetic yet
ultimately diminished by the very industrial and environmental
changes it so assiduously labours to portray. Such is the accelerat-
ed subjugation of the natural world in the age of the Anthropocene
that not even Geyrhalter’s prodigious output can capture it with
sufficient efficacy—which begs the question of whether the image-
ry itself isn’t merely part of the spectacular turn, the highlight reel
of our twilight days. While Geyrhalter’s Our Daily Bread (2015)
may have changed how, or what, we eat, it is less clear what action-
able outcome Earth might engender, other than to make us recog-
nize that we are living in subnature.
Geyrhalter’s oeuvre is predicated upon the paradoxes of the
geologic imagination in the age of late capital. The aggressive and
seemingly exhaustive extraction of natural resources is justified
within this perverse logic, as the earth and its inhabitants are
both increasingly at each others’ precarious disposal and mercy.
No sooner has a border fence been raised above ground to prohibit
the passage of migrants than a tunnel is being burrowed under-

48
ground for the efficient passage of goods. Terra has ceased to be
firma, homo not necessarily sapient. Geyrhalter trains his camera
upon this intersection, where labour is irreducible in its corpore-
al presence while being utterly usurped for geo-corporate gain.
The earth as remainder, left (sometimes literally) hanging in the
balance, is the focus of Geyrhalter’s fastidious gaze. Employing
a rigorous style of precise framing, long shots, fixed camera, and
ambient sound, Geyrhalter’s work acts as a non-didactic form of
disclosure, with the ostensible subject recruited toward a new per-
ceptual awareness. Ecology is, after all, a relatively recent concept.
The very title of Earth announces an inevitable grandeur, but
its locution suggests an operative way of looking that’s at once
monumental and mundane, formidable and modest. Staggering
overhead shots that chapter the film’s geographic sites, registered
like abstract expressionist painting, tilt toward an exposition of
the former tendency—grand in scale, almost unfathomable—while
a subsequent narrowing of the field of vision, revealing human
toil (in mines, quarries, behemoth construction sites) abetted by
or subordinate to heavy machinery, intimates the latter. Yoking
together these extremes, Geyrhalter situates his on-camera in-
terviews with various workers as a kind of mediating point to
reflect on the hazards (personal and environmental) of the job.
Candid testimony, in this context, feels circumscribed by com-
pany standards and job security: a few subjects succeed in going
off-script, though Geyrhalter’s line of questioning, while sincere,
is sometimes rhetorical. “Where are the limits?” he moralistical-
ly implores a foreman, who’s clearly enjoying his time onscreen,
at a vast San Fernando Valley site where mountains are routinely
moved; self-imposed, is the reply.
That the natural world is no longer natural—that human-
kind has eclipsed nature as the prevailing force acting upon the
planet—is the substance of Earth’s polemic. The notion of the
Anthropocene (a cinematic buzzword ever since Lucien Castaing-
Taylor and Véréna Paravel’s Leviathan [2012]) is central to much of
Geyrhalter’s particular anthropology, and is invoked in Earth by
the preliminary (and, mercifully, only) intertitle which informs us
that the 156 million tons of rock and soil moved by human endeav-
our per day is far greater than the 60 million tons of surface soil
moved by rivers, wind, and other forces of nature. Earth is intent
on showing the sites, machines, and operators of such displace-
ment (or “devastation,” depending on one’s view), though any an-
thropogenic framing is still bound to an anthropomorphic sensi-
bility, evinced by Geyrhalter’s conception of the earth’s surface as
a “skin” which has been inexorably “scarred” and “wounded.” This
sentiment is echoed by several interviewees, for whom qualms
of conscience are nonetheless secondary to progress and pride.
“Nature is a cruel mistress,” confides one rig operator, before un-
wittingly nailing the thesis: “Out here, it’s not nature anymore.”
Within the idiom of an anthropogenic reckoning, the notion of
“necessary evil” has become outmoded—it’s merely a new form
of benevolence.
An emphasis on materiality and space imparts the impression
of objectivity, wherein Geyrhalter appears to be capturing, rather
than constructing, the world he is imaging. Owing to such an in-
animate disposition, there is a temptation to situate Geyrhalter’s
work in the context of “speculative realism,” but his is not so much
an ontology as an inventory. Claims of a non-interceding truth are
belied by a formal conception that consists of schematic montage,
pointed editing, and a subtle kind of dramaturgy. Geyrhalter’s
controlled mise en scène and exacting compositions entail a cho-
reography in and of the frame: humans alternately diminished in
an epic landscape or brought centre stage, the camera steadfast
or hitching a ride with an excavator, staring down at the freshly
turned earth. Human, machine, and matter all become figures
within the visual stratum, a spatial arrangement which Geyrhalter
shoots with democratic attention. There is no drama per se, but
Geyrhalter mines the interplay of sentient, social, industrial,
and mineral elements for implications both absurd (witness the
christening, replete with horn section and dynamite blast, of the
world’s largest tunnel boring) and disquieting (a German potash
mine repurposed as a radioactive waste stash).
Though the seven sites visited in Earth are among the most
egregious examples of large-scale geologic manipulation, their ill
effects are rather resistant to representation—which, obviously,
poses something of an aesthetic challenge to documentary cine-
ma. Excavators, loaders, dozers, and backhoes are seen scoring a
sienna sea of dirt in the California wasteland, but no discernible
function can be gleaned from their operations. A tracking shot
from behind a truck travelling the sodden floor of a coal field in
Gyöngyös, Hungary could be mistaken for an outtake from an un-
realized Béla Tarr film, but its lack of specificity unmoors it from
the intrinsic density of correlative functions. In Brenner, Austria,
in a subterranean tunnel that acts as a moveable factory, a young
man in typical hardhat and yellow vest helpfully explains how
excavated material is transported to the surface by a conveyor
belt, but what of the tunnel itself? Where does it physically begin
and end? How dangerous is the pressure build-up alluded to by
engineers? What purpose (passengers or freight) will the tunnel
primarily serve?
In contrast to another, markedly similar documentary,
Baichwal/Burtynsky/de Pencier’s Anthropocene: The Human
Epoch (which Angelo Muredda wrote about in Cinema Scope 78),
Earth makes a virtue of showing rather than telling—but could it
not afford to tell more in its showing? Though Geyrhalter has in-
herited the formal and ethical concerns of the late Harun Farocki,
his own images are not interrogative as such. He could well have
learned from his mentor that some forms of labour are more ap-
pealing to film, and therefore potentially more attractive to view:
e.g., In Comparison (2009), Farocki’s essay about the properties of
the homely brick, may be said to offer a more revealing vision of
labour and material than the monumental Earth.
Nevertheless, the overwhelming scale of the labour that Earth
captures is at once captivating and terrifying, such that the human
agents who manage it are blocked from registering the full impli-
cations of their efforts—though this can, ironically, be a source of
enchantment as much as alienation. One worker describes the ex-
perience of burrowing in the tunnel as if it were a new frontier, and
he an “astronaut”; a marble cutter in Italy describes the adrena-
line rush of his dangerous work with proverbial veni, vidi, vici bra-
vado, while invoking the mountain’s “virginity” (“We get to touch
49

this material, which no one has ever touched before”); a miner in
Hungary compares this terrestrial stripping to a warp in time,
“like travelling into the past,” where vestiges of ancient nature re-
turn as crystallized fossils. However, his contention that wildlife
and flora may reinhabit the filled-in pit “once the area is returned
to nature” indicates an imaginative failure at the root of this en-
deavour, a blithe presumption of continuity at a site of irrevocable
depletion and alteration.
The “no access” policy of the refineries at Fort McKay, Alberta
prompts a detour for Geyrhalter and his film, which shifts to the
liminal space occupied by Indigenous residents who’ve become
exiled on their ancestral land due to the plundering of bitumen-
laden oilsands. “What are they afraid of?” gibes Geyrhalter, film-
ing from the passenger seat in a ride-along with a Dené activist,
but it’s the oil companies (along with the Canadian government)
who actually have little to fear, as their source of foodstuffs is not
in jeopardy from such a rapacious takeover of the land (not yet).
This issue warrants a film of its own, at the very least, but worth
noting here is a change in tack: as Geyrhalter presents us with a
signature long shot and we ready ourselves for yet another tableau
of grand proportions, the expectation is dashed as a small boat
with an outboard motor backs into the frame hitched to a pick-up
truck, which then deposits it waterside. This modest vessel will de-
liver Geyrhalter and his guides to the place “where it all started”: a
landscape abandoned and overgrown, littered with the remnants
of oil speculation, an old refinery going to rust in the undergrowth.
The film stops at road’s end, where a makeshift barricade materi-
alizes a double standard of industry: the prohibition of trespass
where its very incursion has become the rule.
Relieved of the ostensibly grander claims posited by the scope
of Our Daily Bread, Homo Sapiens (2016), and Earth, Geyrhalter’s
“lesser” films (in-between in both a chronological and thematic
sense) are paradoxically tasked with having to do more lifting by
virtue of their more localized, site-specific contexts. In both The
50
Earth
Border Fence (2018), which examines the proposed barrier at the
Brenner Pass to halt an anticipated influx of refugees, and Over the
Years (2015), about the imminent extinction of a traditional textile
mill in lower Austria, Geyrhalter attends to his designated sites in
a way that allows time to inform our knowledge about the popula-
tions that inhabit them. While one could label these films as more
“human” iterations of Geyrhalter’s nonfiction undertaking, it
might make more sense to think of them as simply more sociable,
as all of his films are devoted to humans—indeed, they can’t escape
being so, even if that human presence is sensed only in absentia.
Even though the eponymous boundary in The Border Fence
remains unbuilt—even as the tunnel explored in Earth is bur-
rowed beneath, imbricating this film with the one that follows—
Geyrhalter lingers long enough to witness how its very possibility
becomes an apparition in the collective psyche, listening in on civic
discourse to show how fear migrates into the mind. Border patrol
agents are left presiding over the vacant pass, their slack vigilance
disturbed only by the passing of a friendly black cat. A Senegalese
emigré, a minority Muslim who works as a manager on the drill-
ing of the tunnel, pleads for tolerance in a land where Catholic
sermons literally echo in the valley. The police force holds a press
conference to announce the fence’s dimensions, reassuring locals
that it’s a “wire mesh fence, not a barbed wire fence.” An innkeeper
and her daughter fear the loss of traditions such as Christmas, but
would “never kill for our faith” (an offscreen Geyrhalter refreshes
historical memory of the Crusades). Protesters march for a bor-
der-free Europe. A young toll-booth operator conjectures that
refugees are the fortunate ones who could afford to be smuggled,
while their profiteering handlers represent the “scum” of society.
An elderly farmer argues against the populist politics of fear (“No
one likes to leave their home,” he intones). A plumber speaks of the
historic value of sharing as that which “brings us forward,” recall-
ing that it was Austrians themselves who were forced to flee when
they had no opportunity to survive. Snow melts in the pass, and

coils of wire mesh fence remain unused, stowed in a shipping con-
tainer, its condition regularly inspected by dutiful police. “So, this
is the famous border fence?” asks Geyrhalter, either earnestly or
disingenuously, while his camera remains trained at the site in its
own empirical line of inquiry. Just another relic, this box of metal,
its inertia signifying the ultimate fate of an imagined threat. What
is kept out is no guarantee of what is preserved within.
Over the Years announces its temporal approach eponymously,
yet it is purposed firstly toward the lives of those whom the tex-
tile factory’s approaching closure shall release from their labours.
Intimacy and eventuality are the modus operandi in this por-
trait of workers leaving the factory, which naturally begins with
workers arriving at the factory in the light of dawn and punch-
ing the time clock. A simple statistic (by now a structural virtue
in Geyrhalter’s work) looms matter-of-factly yet elegiacally over
the action: employees are few, and the time is nigh. (Telling of
Geyrhalter’s stylistic consistency is the means with which he films
fabric in textile production as he would pelt in food production,
as well as the way that screen time with his subjects is not contin-
gent upon the work they do. Border patrol, bovine breeders, log
splitters, factory bosses, milk-truck drivers, chemical waste han-
dlers—all have work to do, and all are given an unjudged amount
of time before Geyrhalter’s camera.) What becomes of seven for-
mer workers over the course of a decade constitutes an exercise
in extemporaneous living and filmmaking, its arc the closest to
narrative that Geyrhalter comes. Protagonists emerge as a matter
of course: the “sovereign” camera (Geyrhalter’s term) of the stat-
ic factory yields to a more itinerant shooting method as the film
cedes to the impermanence of quotidian life. The mundane is en-
cumbered with the same proportionate weight as marble carved
from a mountain: a man nudging a pile of cat food on the kitchen
floor with his index finger is momentous in its detail in relation to
jobless time, as are other instances of pedestrian habitude. An on-
going ledger inscribed with the titles of an entire music collection
Homo Sapiens
(later transcribed on an archaic computer); the separation of cob-
blestone from gravel in the rock quarry; a shy woman’s sales pitch
for knife sets as she joins the ranks of Tupperware party attend-
ees; a circumspect man whose fingers were maimed in the mill,
now building a doll cradle for his granddaughter; the shovelling of
snow; line dancing as a source of unforeseen palliative power.
Geyrhalter’s attempt to turn life into art is in some senses anal-
ogous to the posthumous occupation of the Anderl factory as a
sound installation: it doesn’t always easily translate, or it runs the
risk of being tone-deaf to the exigencies of its once-working in-
habitants, for whom the din of such machinery is no music at all.
Meticulous composition is at some point betrayed by content, as
the pleasingly symmetrical image of adjacent garbage dumpsters
is interrupted by one man’s sad plundering within them, reduced
as he is to collecting aluminum cans for recycling money. A fami-
ly, whom we’ve watched grow before our very eyes, sits in lumpen
anticipation at a racetrack while Geyrhalter persists in his ques-
tioning, perhaps oblivious to their desire to watch the cars pulling
up to the starting line. There’s even an instance in which one sub-
ject questions the utility of his participation in the film: “Well, you
probably can’t use all this,” he muses of his necessarily ineloquent
testimony. Inevitably, someone will have to turn his or her back to
the camera.
Still, in spite of an ever-convincing critique of sumptuous cine-
matic treatments of suffering, it seems there is nothing Geyrhalter
isn’t afraid of confronting with his camera. He employs a fixity of
means to render the flux of life, with an acumen that is both chill-
ing and deeply affecting; a cinema that is symptomatic in its cir-
cumscription of our world. What he’s leaving behind is his collect-
ed evidence of the wreckage, to be regarded as its own fossilized
tribute to evanescence. Seen from the future imperfect, his will
have been the vision that, upon seeing a mountain, framed it ex-
quisitely, while noticing not just how it reached up to heaven, but
also how it reached down into hell.
51
52
 Festivals | By James Lattimer

143 rue du désert

Oroslan

And That’s Exactly

How it Was
The 72nd Locarno Film Festival
The 72nd edition of the Locarno Film Festival—the first under the
artistic direction of Lili Hinstin—was notable for the strength of
its documentary offerings, albeit hardly in the conventional sense.
Within a solid line-up whose names and general tone didn’t devi-
ate all that much from recent years, the films that stood out most
were the ones that tapped into the realm of nonfiction—which isn’t
to say they were necessarily documentaries. First and foremost
among them was Pedro Costa’s Vitalina Varela (which walked
off with both the Golden Leopard and the prize for Best Actress),
much of whose force derives from the fact that its astounding pro-
tagonist is performing a version of her own life story.
Set against Costa’s singular, uncompromising vision, most of
the rest of the Competition felt meek, quite possibly because their
fictions felt at such a remove from matters of the real. While Les
enfants d’Isidora by Damian Manivel, who won Best Director,
takes the true story of American dancer Isadora Duncan losing

53
her two children in a car accident as its starting point, only in the
last of the three present-day episodes that weave around this past
tragedy does Manivel manage to break out of the straitjacket of lit-
eralism and tastefulness otherwise in evidence—a case of fictional
invention creating unnecessary restriction rather than freedom.
There’s little resembling real life in Park Jung-bum’s Height of the
Wave, which bafflingly took home the Special Jury Prize. Although
the directorial skill Park evidenced in Alive (2014) shines through
at times, this scripted-to-death genre piece about the rotten core
of a suitably barren-looking Korean island ends up more sudsy
than Shakespearean. And João Nicolau’s Technoboss repeats the
supposed spectacle of an inept middle-aged businessman burst-
ing into song at the wheel so frequently that it loses any initial
bounce it had, as if having to endure yet another story of an afflu-
ent, vaguely lascivious white guy ending up with the girl weren’t a
downer enough.
Perhaps the jury only saw fit to award one austere, uncategoriz-
able work of cinema that unfolds mostly in darkness, which might
explain why Eloy Enciso’s Endless Night, the Competition’s other
clear highlight, went home empty-handed. The opening part of the
Galician director’s third feature unfolds as a series of conversa-
tions conducted at various locations within an unnamed city, most
of which are public: outside a church, in a bus, at the bus station, in
the bar, in the office of the prospective mayor. These conversations
revolve around the current state of life, taking in politics, wealth,
poverty, and how this present differs from the past—even if it’s in-
itially difficult to pinpoint when all this is actually taking place,
as both the images and dialogue are strangely bereft of obvious
temporal signifiers.
The next segment sees one of the many previous speakers
emerge as a protagonist of sorts and leave the city behind him,
moving downriver and passing through snow-covered landscapes
and shadowy forests, with each encounter along the way producing
new accounts of suffering and violence, until at some point they
are shifted into the voiceover. Over time, verbal and visual details
proliferate to such an extent that the link to the Spanish Civil War
becomes impossible to overlook, even as the film’s exact temporal-
ity remains in flux. This realization is accompanied by the growing
sense that these speakers are not so much characters as vessels for
other people’s words, which, as the closing titles indicate, are in-
deed taken from assorted documents from the era of the Franco
dictatorship, including exile literature, personal memoirs, and let-
ters written by those incarcerated in jails or concentration camps
across Galicia. This idea of returning historical texts to the loca-
tions that birthed them and capturing the new sparks they give off
places Endless Night in the tradition of both Ruth Beckermann’s
The Dreamed Ones (2016) and Christian Petzold’s Transit (2018),
which also draw considerable force from the constant friction be-
tween past and present.
If such films are coalescing into a nascent genre, Enciso’s unique
contribution is the incorporation of landscape, across which his-
tory reverberates without leaving obvious traces. As the solitary
figure moves through the trees in darkness—lent a solemn, spec-
tral beauty by the camerawork of star cinematographer Mauro
Herce—there’s nothing visible from the present to dissipate all the
54
echoes set in motion by what the voice is saying, which progres-
sively feels as crushing as this night is endless. This is then, but
this is also now, in Galicia, Spain, and beyond. So much of what is
said could be referencing any one or all three, at any given time,
including what the beggar remarks before the church: “This is the
worst world I know.”
It’s just as difficult to determine exactly what Matjaz Ivanisin’s
second feature Oroslan is doing at any one time, although the big-
gest, typically muted surprise it has in store is that everything
here is fiction. Before the name “Oroslan” is spoken around ten
minutes in, the film has been pure, wordless process, showing how
food is prepared at some small industrial facility and spooned into
a variety of coloured plastic containers, which are then driven by
van through the misty Slovenian countryside, hung on hooks out-
side a variety of isolated rural homes, and finally collected by their
elderly inhabitants. When one container remains conspicuously
unclaimed, two men from the village pub knock on the door and
call its owner’s name; his body is carried out of the house short-
ly afterwards. Oroslan’s demise will only be discussed in the pub
later on, between car journeys, conversations about football, other
village deaths, laundry being pressed, and a glimpse of the inner
workings of a slaughterhouse. Later, it’s summer, the landscape is
sunny and green, and each person placed before the camera has
something to say about the dead man, his drinking, his laughter,
and his apparent ability to predict the future, as if a verbal monu-
ment of compassion and kindness were being erected for a man
never seen.
The quiet poise with which Ivanisin captures the specificity of
the setting and the wonderfully faked authenticity of the closing
testimonies speak to his documentary past, although Oroslan is
actually an adaptation of Zdravko Dusa’s short story “And That’s
Exactly How it Was,” whose title is as gently suggestive as the film
itself. For if anything, Oroslan is an attempt to represent the very
opposite: that even in the seemingly smallest of places, life is com-
posed of so many overlapping and intertwining processes, digres-
sions, and “big” events that no one can ever say exactly how it is,
let alone how it was. The offscreen, entirely nondescript death of
Oroslan is made all the sadder for the fact that it is just one fleeting
eddy in a much larger flow, felt less and less as the main current
keeps moving downstream. In a film that remains exquisitely slip-
pery to the end, the only sure thing is that even the dog still sitting
on its master’s doorstep will eventually get up and leave.
Maya Kosa and Sergio da Costa’s La île aux oiseaux, which
screened alongside Oroslan in the Filmmakers of the Present
section, has just as keen an eye for process and the weight of the
small, although the layer of fiction it places over its even more in-
timate setting is much thinner. The Swiss duo’s second feature is
a portrait of a bird sanctuary close to the Geneva airport, which
the viewer gets to know in tandem with Antonin, a young man who
has been assigned there by the authorities to help him reconnect
with society, with the expectation that he will soon replace Paul,
the senior keeper, following the latter’s imminent retirement.
Antonin learns how to fill water bottles, handle the rats and mice
bred as bird fodder and, eventually the methods of killing them,
while observing the tiny facility’s avian residents and the two
 La île aux oiseaux
women who care for them and treat their various ailments, com-
menting on his impressions in voiceover. It’s hard not to share
Antonin’s growing fascination with all these vulnerable-seeming
birds based on the way in which Kosa and da Costa record them, in
patient, beautifully composed tableaux, the sun-dappled light of
the enclosures captured on soft 16mm.
With the employees of the sanctuary playing themselves and
no dominant plotline aside from Antonin’s learning process, the
film’s fictional interventions take place at a more unobtrusive, yet
deeper level: the descriptions of the birds’ conditions, which al-
lude to allegory and metaphysics without truly spelling them out;
the subtle accumulation of incidents and the concurrent cycles
they gradually form themselves into; the talk of how life outside
makes injury inevitable, and of those residents already freed who
are still trying to return. If this sanctuary is indeed an island in the
midst of a hostile world, its own ecosystem is not without ambiva-
lence. Humans breed mice and rats and birds eat them, although
rats will happily devour birds too, and humans are not immune
from death either. However much compassion, care, and solidarity
is in evidence in this place, there are all manner of wounds none-
theless; the gaping holes in the flesh of the birds are unavoidably,
upsettingly real.
Hassen Ferhani’s 143 rue du désert, an observational documen-
tary from Algeria far less concerned with experimentation than
either La île aux oiseaux or Oroslan, ended up with the prize for
Emerging Director in the Filmmakers of the Present competi-
tion. Ferhani’s crowd-pleasing second feature work is an example
of a familiar format being executed with such intelligence and
clarity that you wonder why it happens so rarely. The entire film
is built around a woman almost as formidable as Vitalina Varela,
and just as much of a magnet for the camera: the corpulent, whip-
smart Malika, who runs a small roadside café on National 1, the
country’s main highway, which connects Algiers in the north
Endless Night
to Tamanrasset in the south and runs right through the Sahara
desert along the way. This 20-metre-square hut in the middle of
nowhere is both business and home for Malika, her dog, and her
cat, as well as a welcome stopping-off point for truckers and other
transients alike, most of whom are already well-acquainted with
the loquacious sexagenarian businesswoman.
While the furthest 143 rue du désert ever strays from Malika’s
miniature realm is the gas station being constructed little more
than a stone’s throw away, this stark, isolated setting which she
is never seen to leave proves more of a virtue than a restriction.
Ferhani has an innate grasp of all the parameters that can be var-
ied in and around this one location— inside/out, night/day, noise/
quiet, stillness/activity, strangers/friends, distance/proximi-
ty—and keeps them moving with almost mathematical precision,
throwing up more than enough different permutations to ensure
that fresh angles always emerge and the interest never wanders.
Garrulous encounters thus give way to periods of solitude, lengthy
silences usher in traffic sounds or impromptu dancing, and neon
light takes over from the desert sun.
Each set of people that call upon Malika also functions as a slow
drip-feed of information about the country and the woman herself
in equal measure—a portrait of person and place as one that is at
once organic, far-reaching, and unusually entertaining. And per-
haps most gratifyingly of all, there’s never any sense that the film
is anything other than a meeting of equals, as Ferhani’s various in-
terventions from behind the camera to translate or clarify demon-
strate an entirely different stance to that of the invisible, omni-
potent presence common to so many documentaries, while Malika
herself seems well aware that she’s just as capable of steering the
proceedings as he is. In fact, the obvious lie she tells towards the
film’s end suggests she’s perhaps even one step ahead: natural per-
formers like her are more than familiar with the conventions of
the stage.
55
Books | By Adam Nayman

Back to the Future Part II

Golden Eighties
J. Hoberman’s Make My Day: Movie Culture in the Age of Reagan

The news cycle waits for no one, not even J. Hoberman. Opening
up the former Village Voice critic’s new book Make My Day—the
conclusion, following The Dream Life and An Army of Phantoms,
of his “Found Illusions” trilogy, which traces the intersection of
Hollywood fantasies and American political reality in the trans-
formative decades after World War II—on the same day that The
Atlantic published an article detailing Ronald Reagan’s appalling
comments to Richard Nixon about the members of a Tanzanian
delegation to the United Nations in 1971, I couldn’t help but lament
the anecdote’s lack of inclusion in Hoberman’s otherwise compre-
hensively withering mock-hagiography of the 40th Commander
in Chief. Perhaps in a future edition the author will find a way, in
his inimitable style, to link the audiotaped evidence of a current
and future US President commiserating about “monkeys from
African countries” to a contemporaneous Movie Event. I myself
would nominate the moment in Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss
Song (1971) when a racist LAPD commissioner (John Dullaghan)
utters a vicious slur at a public press conference—a late-breaking
verbal confirmation of attitudes that the film’s African-American
characters (and target audience) would hardly consider a surprise.

56
 That Melvin Van Peebles’ epochal proto-blaxploitation master-
piece—one of the most urgent movies of the early ’70s—barely war-
rants a mention in Make My Day is at once a bit disappointing, yet
also to be expected within the context of its author’s project, which
aims its analysis at the mainstream. It’s certainly not the case that
Hoberman lacks interest or proficiency in chronicling films ema-
nating from the margins: 1983’s Midnight Movies, co-written with
Jonathan Rosenbaum, still stands as one of the most important
documents of a cinema of aesthetic and industrial resistance. One
of the organizing principles of that book is the idea that the extrem-
ity of underground auteurs like Jack Smith and David Lynch, be-
sides providing a lurid lure for viewers looking to prove their own
endurance and/or avant-garde bona fides, was also a necessary cor-
rective to the hedging of Hollywood—even the supposed heroes of
the ’70s (your Coppolas, Scorseses, Friedkins et al.), whose studio
affiliations ultimately dictated elements of their output.
Where Midnight Movies sought out self-styled culture warri-
ors projecting their head-trips at the witching hour, the “Found
Illusions” series seeks something like the reverse, plunging into
the collective unconscious of matinee-appropriate movies (and
genres) and revealing the ideological demons within. It’s film
criticism as a form of exorcism, or, perhaps more appropriately,
ghostbusting: the cover of Make My Day features a caricature of
the Gipper emerging out of the iconic Ghostbusters logo holding
a smoking .44 Magnum, a supernatural Harry Callahan to com-
plement the bodily one that adorned the cover of The Dream Life;
beneath the cut line, an army of phantoms (or are they dead-eyed
Klansmen?) contentedly munch on their popcorn. Signed by
the great cartoonist Art Spiegelman (just recently exiled from
a Marvel gig for criticizing Trump), it’s a delirious, semiotical-
ly complex image, a visual equivalent to Hoberman’s prose and a
perfect evocation of his thesis that Reagan’s presidency represent-
ed a kind of ghostly apotheosis: the slow, inevitable ascension of
a celebrity into a position of actual rather than symbolic author-
ity, even as symbolism and iconography became the hallmarks of
his supremely media-savvy regime. Never a true box-office draw,
Reagan was a supporting character in An Army of Phantoms and
The Dream Life (which were set in the ’50s and ’60s, respectively),
but in Make My Day he emerges as an ironic protagonist, seizing
the popular imagination—and with it, political power—near the
end of the ’70s and easing into a reign which, counting the proxy
figure of his VP George H.W. Bush, cast the entire decade in the
artificial sunlight of the old Hollywood backstages where he’d first
made his bones as an entertainer: “Morning in America,” no mat-
ter how dark the methodology behind the façade.
The most perceptive and timely aspect of Make My Day is its
focus on nostalgia as a tool of pop-cultural placation, locating
George Lucas’ career-making American Graffiti (1973) and its
mass-marketed rallying cry of “Where Were You in ’62?” as a ges-
ture (however unintentional) of erasure against the critical up-
heavals of the late ’60s. Quoting Frederic Jameson’s observation
that Lucas’ immersive ’50s fantasia “sought to embody the mes-
merizing lost reality of the Eisenhower era,” Hoberman argues
persuasively that American Graffiti (and its putative TV spin-offs
Happy Days and Laverne and Shirley) were the heralds of Reagan’s
time-travelling rhetoric, anticipating a collective wish to return to
the womb-like security of post-World War II moral and political
certainties (c.f. Back to the Future [1985], which turned Reagan’s
election into a diegetic joke). The relevance of these reactionary
fantasies, as well as their seemingly inextinguishable persistence
in our present tense, is easily understood, and Hoberman doesn’t
shy away from invoking Trump, albeit mostly in an epilogue which
posits him more as the end product of an endlessly proliferating
(and pustulating) cable-news landscape than a creature of the
movies à la Reagan.
Hoberman, obviously, is more interested in the movies, and it’s
his acknowledgment of Reagan’s place within that lineage that ac-
counts for Make My Day’s fanatical sense of focus; even its digres-
sions (and they are legion) are on point. This is not a particularly
heavy book, tone-wise (it gallops past disparaging Pauline Kael
reviews and actual clandestine war crimes at the same breakneck
pace), but, through it all, Hoberman’s contempt for his chosen an-
ti-hero is incandescent, never more so than in the extracts from
old Village Voice pieces strung through its narrative at irregular
intervals. But, like any big-game hunter worth his salt (from Ahab
to Robert Shaw’s Quint in Jaws [1975]), he respects his quarry’s
capabilities: at times, the tone is almost reminiscent of Hunter S.
Thompson’s Rolling Stone broadsides against Nixon, which regu-
larly descended into the language of Universal monster movies.
And there is surely something a bit gonzo about the book’s struc-
ture, which echoes its predecessors by unfolding chronologically
over its chosen historical terrain (1971-1988) as a bifurcated sur-
vey of notable movies (including variably detailed overviews of
their critical and commercial reception) and concurrent develop-
ments beyond the screen, with special attention paid to the elec-
toral cycles of 1976, 1980, and 1984.
Where in Army of Phantoms and The Dream Life Hoberman had
to draw on the films—and commentary—of a bygone era teeming
with masterpieces both in and adjacent to the old studio system,
the period in Make My Day is connected to his own career tra-
jectory. As a result, he writes with more authority even as the
movies themselves are a less enthralling proposition. A few titles
stand out as being more or less author-approved: Warren Beatty’s
Commie epic Reds (1981); the pungent pulp fictions of James
Cameron (The Terminator, 1984) and Paul Verhoeven (Robocop,
1987); the collected works of that now critically revitalized Old
Master Robert Zemeckis. For the most part, though, Hoberman
substitutes scrutiny for enthusiasm, placing a string of canonical
blockbusters—including the inevitable Spielberg trifecta of Jaws,
Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977), and Raiders of the Lost
Ark (1981), along with the Star Wars trilogy—under the micro-
scope and observing therein the symptoms (if not root causes) of
maladies that still have yet to be fully cured.
Reading between the lines of Hoberman’s sweeping, assertive
rhetoric is rarely difficult, as when he cites Leni Riefenstahl ahead
of Kurosawa and The Wizard of Oz (1939) in his list of Star Wars’
influences. He stops short of proposing Lucas and Spielberg as
full-on equivalents to the modern Republican political machine,
57

yet returns time and time again to the implications of their spe-
cial-effects-driven spectacles and the imitators they spawned in
their wake. The more vertiginous the suspension of disbelief, the
less tolerance there is amongst audiences for reality, whether in
terms of style or content. The question of whether such hyperbol-
ically escapist entertainments were meeting a genuine demand or
manifesting their own form of trickle-down economics—consoli-
dating wealth and influence at the top of the Hollywood establish-
ment—keeps getting cracked open so that Hoberman can slam it
(and his case) closed whenever he needs some momentum.
The appeal of a book like Make My Day lies less in its grand uni-
fied theories than in the opportunities it affords an able, commit-
ted critic like Hoberman to dig into a variety of individual titles,
and he doesn’t disappoint: there are bits here that you’ll want to
read again even before you’ve finished them. The sections compar-
ing Jaws and Nashville (1975) as crypto-patriotic panoramas (and
variations on the disaster-movie formula) is a tour de force, while
the passages on the underdog populism of Rocky (1976) (with its
wack racial politics subsumed within its pandering prole poetry)
and the subversive Flower Power subtext of Philip Kaufman’s
remake of Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978) bristle with in-
sight. Spiegelman’s Ghostbusters illustration gets paid off with
a thorough lancing of Ivan Reitman’s lazily paradigm-shifting
horror-comedy, which Hoberman correctly pegs as both a not-so-
secretly conservative comedy (its main human villain works for
the EPA) as well as a breakthrough in the merging of narrative and
advertising. Where in E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial (1982) Spielberg
had brilliantly deployed product placement to consolidate a sense
of authenticity (a gambit kidded smartly by Joe Dante in Gremlins
[1984], with its hilarious abuse of an E.T. doll), Ghostbusters dram-
atized its own brand extension: “the movie is remarkably cynical
in its view of capitalism and the marketplace, happily ending with
a blitz of ancillary merchandising.”
Elsewhere, Hoberman excavates every scrap of ideological
shrapnel from the monumentally incoherent text that is Red Dawn
(1984), with its transposed Cold War paranoia almost cancelled
out by John Milius’ admiration for the effectiveness and nobility
58
of Che Guevara-style guerrilla tactics. It’s conflicted, unruly mov-
ies like Red Dawn—or John Carpenter’s similarly contradictory
They Live (1988), which pits Reaganite aliens against pathetically
ineffectual left-wing activists—that sit right in Hoberman’s wheel-
house, and he delights in wrestling with them. It’s also always fun
to read him on David Lynch, whose Blue Velvet (1986) gets com-
pared (via the criticism of the ever-underrated Howard Hampton)
to Kings Row (1942), in which Reagan was famously maimed: twin
portraits of small-town suburbia with dark secrets roiling beneath
the surface.
Spielberg and Altman, Lucas and Lynch, Stallone and
Schwarzenegger: all are capacious candidates for analysis, and yet
it’s the very ubiquity of Hoberman’s chosen figureheads that argu-
ably constitutes his book’s biggest flaw. In a superbly considered
review of Make My Day in The Brooklyn Rail—one good enough, in
fact, to make me wish I hadn’t read it before attempting my own—
Madeleine Whittle zeroed in on the precise calculus dictating its
contents, an “implicit, common-sense premise that box-office re-
ceipts are more or less directly analogous to a popular vote and,
by extension, to presidential politics…movies that attract large
audiences… [reflect] the zeitgeist in the same way that a President
can be seen as a manifestation of the majority’s desires.” While
Whittle isn’t saying anything that Hoberman doesn’t cover in his
own introduction (and she cedes this very point by quoting him di-
rectly on the common denominator between democracy and mass
culture), it’s still a worthwhile caveat that makes certain omissions
all the more frustrating: even if I’m not exactly hankering for more
Hobermanian allusions to Joel and Ethan’s “Coendescension”
(limited here to a one-line appraisal of Blood Simple [1984] as
“triumphantly snide”), surely the sophisticated neo-screwball hi-
jinks of Raising Arizona (1987), with its cash-strapped white-trash
protagonists, purposeful franchise-movie parody (Randall “Tex”
Cobb dresses like Mad Max and blows up like Jaws), and mention
of “that sumbitch Reagan in the White House” (not meant in jest)
could have been thrown into the mix?
The point of this sidelining of American independent cinema—
and, with it, its relative plurality of voices (not that the Coens are
exactly exemplars of diversity)—may be implicit: in a decade that
began with The Empire Striking Back and concluded with the
marketizing blitz of Batmania, the rebels (with or without causes)
didn’t gain much traction. This is fair enough, but the sum total
of strip-mining so many cast-iron blockbusters for fugitive mean-
ings is a feeling that, 30 years deeper into the cultural rut whose
digging provides Make My Day with its accelerating downward arc
(onscreen and off), a genuinely progressive popular cinema is an
impossibility, and also that the role of the responsible critic is sim-
ply to survey the damage (cynically or earnestly, take your pick).
Hoberman has more than earned the right to look back (with anger
or worse) on the period where he made his bones as a critic, and
however indulgent certain of his self-citations may seem (e.g., re-
printing in full his essays on Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom
[1984] and Top Gun [1986]), they’re ultimately reminders of how
much it sucks that this writer who knows the enemy when he sees
it is no longer on the front lines.
 Books | By Phoebe Chen

Silence
and Presence
Chantal Akerman’s My Mother Laughs

For certain filmmakers—attractive women—there is a popular

kind of on-set photo that telegraphs authority: one eye pressed to
the viewfinder of some behemoth camera, she is caught in a contra-
glamour shot that codes the pragmatic as cool. Naturally, there
is one of Chantal Akerman, taken some time in the late ’70s—
shaggy-haired and squinting while filming Dis-moi (1980), a pro-
ject commissioned for French TV—that has since adorned the var-
ious retrospectives and publications bearing her name. It offers
a quintessence: here is the artist with her tools of choice, fierce-
ly focused and rapt in her practice. True enough, though I prefer
to think of this artist with another set of tools: in a Criterion in-
terview on the making of Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce,
1080 Bruxelles, Akerman described how she “stitched pieces of
time together,” reconstructing fragments to feign the “real time”
of a dragged-out present, where a minute onscreen feels like five
in the spectating body. “Stitching”: hardier than Tarkovsky’s
“sculpting,” and much more pragmatic. Of the editing process for
D’Est (1993), undertaken with her longtime collaborator, Claire
Atherton, Akerman evoked a similar tactility: “I have to be very

59
relaxed, very close to myself, so that I can really feel each shot…
when I felt that the shot has gone for just the right length, so that
something came through, but not too much, I’d say, ‘Here!’”
What does the stitcher of time do with her threads when the
medium is text? Moments accrue a different tempo in a lexical
present. This year, Akerman’s Goncourt-shortlisted memoir, Ma
mère rit (2013), has found an afterlife in English as My Mother
Laughs, in no less than two translations: by Corina Copp for The
Song Cave in the US, and Daniella Shreir for Silver Press in the
UK (all quotes below are excerpts from the latter). The memoir’s
title flags the familiar territory of maternal exchange that recurs
throughout Akerman’s work, from the epistolary distance of News
from Home (1977) to the conversational immediacy of her last
film, No Home Movie (2015). Motherhood even leaps back a gener-
ation in the 2004 installation at Marian Goodman Gallery, where
rooms of projected footage centre the diary of Akerman’s mater-
nal grandmother, who perished in Auschwitz. But with an artist so
cross-medially dexterous, excursions in form tell more than those
in theme, which tend to remain consistent. In the to-ing-and-fro-
ing between written and spoken word, moving image in the cine-
ma’s black box and the gallery’s white cube, there is the sense of
a maker managing the limits of one form with the consolations
of another.
My Mother Laughs is the final installment in two decades of spo-
radic autobiography, but the first to feel monumentally literary.
Its frank prose and brusque clauses were rehearsed in 1998’s slim
roman à clef, Une famille à Bruxelles, as was Akerman’s particu-
lar way of writing characters, who remain fuzzy around the edges.
Any certainty about who is speaking (or being spoken of) is lost to
an in-text roaming that settles into pronouns only to switch them
at leisure: mid-passage, I becomes she with disorienting ease.
(“The child was born old and so the child never became an adult,”
Akerman writes, about…herself.) A few events tease a narrative—
the routines of caring for her mother and her various ailments;
the blooming and dying of a toxic relationship; a niece’s overseas
wedding and all its logistics—but are told with nothing so helpful
as a chronology, relying instead on strange loops and recursive
jaunts. To further muddy time, place, and speaker, punctuation is
often elided: without quotation marks, address that seems forth-
right doubles back on its clarity. “I can remember your smile when
I opened the door to you in London, that’s what she said to me
one day,” Akerman writes of C., a violent ex-lover; or, “I’ve made a
home for you, she said to me one day,” tacked-on deferrals that jar
with the fleeting ventriloquy.
Akerman more famously (and literally) voiced the words of an-
other in News from Home, where long takes of New York in its twilit
blues are soundtracked to the letters her mother wrote her from
Belgium in 1972. Akerman reads aloud only her mother’s side of
the correspondence, her voice quiet and shrouded in just enough
static that the ocean-crossing missives fade into the urban din. In
many of her other documentaries, particularly the landscape trio
that began with D’Est, there are long tracts of silence— ambient
noise, sure (the rustling of clothes in a bedroom, the faint rolling
of a distant vehicle), but no post-hoc music, no centre-stage speech.
60
This conspicuous absence was a motif all through Akerman’s
life: she often referenced her mother’s refusal to speak about the
Holocaust, leaving her with a childhood “full of gaps.” Elsewhere,
silence becomes ominous: “When James Baldwin writes about
the silence of the South and how he doesn’t know what’s hidden
behind the silence,” she said, in an interview about her film Sud
(1999), “that behind the silence can be someone who wants to kill
you—well, again, I was thinking of the camps.” These are absenc-
es that haunt, refuse to fall by the wayside, and in their persistent
return acquire a presence real enough to kill—or else shake the
foundations of a life.
There is no pareil for the mute, roving camera in written text.
On the page, words have nothing but presence. In My Mother
Laughs, silence has to be declared as such: “Words are spoken
and exchanged. Silence”; “We drove in silence”; “Instead, a heavy
silence”; “We sat in silence for a moment.” Every ten or so pages,
silence announces itself, by turns “heavy” or “loud,” “momentary”
or “lingering”; sometimes the hallmark of her suffering, some-
times a reprieve. No surprise that a filmmaker who always dealt in
so many varieties of silence would know to pick from this litany for
her writing, setting its cues where words fail.
For Akerman, a propensity for literature preceded cinema.
It was Godard’s Pierrot le fou (1965) that first affirmed film as
an equivalent art form to her 15-year-old self, though her faith
in books over images has been reiterated time and again. Her
insistence to Godard, in a 1979 interview, that her mistrust of
representation is anchored in her religious upbringing and the
Jewish injunction against idolatry, became a refrain in countless
interviews over the years, winnowed down to pithy quotability
in a 2011 conversation with Nicole Brenez (“The image is an idol
in an idolatrous world”). Akerman has adapted hefty narratives
from canonical literature—Proust’s La prisonnière as the darkly
obsessive La captive (2003), Joseph Conrad’s first novel Almayer’s
Folly as a troubled 2011 production of the same name—and has res-
onated with the riveting melancholy of certain poets: Sylvia Plath
in an adaptation of Rose Leiman Goldemberg’s play Letters Home
(1977); or Anna Akhmatova, who was the motivating force for a
1990 trip to Moscow that culminated in D’Est, a different kind of
film entirely. So when she says, in Lettre d’un cinéaste (1984), “If
I make cinema, it is because of what I do not dare do in writing,” I
want to know what she is afraid of.
Maybe the failure of language, its disappointing limitations.
Writing can seem just as suspect as those idolatrous images: My
Mother Laughs even opens with the unhappy disavowal, “I wrote it
all down and now I don’t like what I’ve written.” Twice, an expres-
sion of joy follows some perceived truth-telling: “She’s finally say-
ing something and it’s the truth. I was happy”; then, “My mother
was telling the truth. I was terribly happy.” Only once, towards the
end, the article signalling an impossible absolute is switched out
for something subjective, and its results dismay: “this time she’s
speaking the truth, not the truth, but her truth, and it was horri-
ble.” Even in a 1976 interview with B. Ruby Rich, a young Akerman
contended with the finicky translation of truth, noting that the
actors in her since-disavowed second film wanted to improvise,

wanted to be “verist…Like verité.” Its English equivalent is elusive:
Rich offers “realistic” as a translation, but Akerman still insists
on verist. It’s “naturalistic” that hits the spot: her actors wanted
to add things to “make it more natural,” missing the point with
crowded affectations.
The loyal pursuit of truth is, in part, the burden of form and his-
tory, a genre of self-writing in French literature that dates back to
Rousseau’s Confessions and was manipulated to radical effect in
the work of Marguerite Duras and Nathalie Sarraute. Akerman
has no illusions about writing: in a radio interview with Laurent
Goumarre, she readily accedes the memoir’s certain fictions, “be-
cause as soon as we write we always fall back into fiction.” But
knowledge and desire collide, as ever: “through this fiction, what
matters to me is to be true,” she adds. A paradox can be reassuring,
help temper the dissonance between knowing there isn’t a way to
inscribe an absolute truth, but wanting one anyway—and feeling
then the abject drag of its impossibility. How many sentences were
begun with hopeful conviction, and then re-read with hollowing
embarrassment?
Even a single word can unsettle and displace, those “words or
things that could just as easily make you think of something else.”
Connotations spring unbidden, as with the unlikely evocation of
survivorship (her mother’s, her own) when someone mentions
that “the air is pure,” or that “something is crawling with lice, or
even when someone mentions a crisis-point.” The mind juggles its
associations: “the word ‘remember’ too, and the word ‘memory.’
We have so many duties now. Like not smoking anymore, and the
word ‘smoke’ also makes me shudder. As well as the word ‘field’ and
the word ‘earth.’” Without the totemic referent of images, sentenc-
es dip in and out of a lost past: now, her mother “still has a few hairs
on her head, she who was once so elegant. She who was once such
a beauty.” Her aging face is garish with blush and lipstick, then,
pages later, she is suddenly half her age and radiant in a gold- and
orange-striped summer dress, asking her kid daughter to help do
up the back.
Writing accommodates a different mode of return, beyond the
indexed image and its concrete playback. Akerman’s memories
of one event are spliced with another, doubling (tripling, quadru-
pling) back with new elaborations. Just as she relays her own giddy
courtship and tumultuous breakup, the details of her niece’s wed-
ding come and go in fragments: Akerman and her mother in the
synagogue, surrounded by photographers and videographers as
the wedding march sounds, then intervening pages that flit back to
New York and Akerman’ time with C. Paragraphs later, an abrupt
encore to the wedding, now circling back with details that wer-
en’t there before: it’s ten in the morning and the house is already
crowded, hairdressers and make-up artists crammed to bursting;
her niece in a wedding dress, veiled and magnificent. Everything is
being photographed with forensic attention. It’s tempting to read
these constant revisitations as something ritualistic, a means to
keep in touch with a hallowed past—but Akerman knows that rep-
etition is both sacred and banal. In a 2009 Criterion interview, she
talks about the ease with which she first drafted Jeanne Dielman,
so familiar were the domestic rites and movements of this (barely)
fictive woman: three aunts on her father’s side and three more on
her mother’s had been education enough. Within household walls,
“everything had been turned into a ritual,” she says, “in a way to
replace Jewish ritual.” The religious turn seems incongruous, but
then it’s always limned her sense of the ordinary.
For all her suspicions of idolatry, Akerman seemed more con-
fident with the image—not just because she was first and fore-
most a filmmaker, but because her foundational mistrust of
representation gave her enough distance to ask a little less of
it. A bad sentence can be shameful in ways a poor shot can’t. In
the memoir’s final pages, her mother accuses her of rarely want-
ing to talk, but Akerman claims that sometimes she just shuts
down, or has nothing to say. Silence is better than words that
fall short. “But you don’t have to have something to say in or-
der to speak,” her mother suggests; “You can just say something
then something else, that’s how people talk.” She knows she re-
peats herself, that her daughter might find it annoying, and yet.
Something then something else. Words that disenchant the first
time round can sound better the next (or worse). That’s how
people talk. And how they live, no less. Once, Akerman recalls, in
the early flames of a new love, she’d found brief loquacity: “Words,
the same words repeated over and over again, I’d even become
acquainted with the words of love in a dead language. I spoke so
much. I shouldn’t have.” But: “Yes,” she writes, “I was starting to
live again.”
61
TV or Not TV | By Christoph Huber

There’s No Business Like

Slow Business
Too Old to Die Young

Although it’s been served up since June on Amazon Prime in ten

installments, Nicolas Winding Refn emphatically declared his—
let’s call it “project” rather than “series” for the moment—Too Old
to Die Young “not TV,” but rather a “13-hour movie” at this year’s
Cannes, where he presented two episodes, pointedly snatched
from the middle of the show’s chronology to mirror today’s alea-
tory online viewing habits. (Does the latter make Winding Refn’s
epic also an act of defiance against the medium’s normal line-
ar progression? Certainly, with its character arcs converging at
near-interminable rates, it often feels as if it could be watched at
random—a method its director has also endorsed, all contradic-
tions be damned.) But I guess Winding Refn’s own definition of his
work is fair enough, given that Too Old to Die Young takes his devel-
opment as a filmmaker towards dilation—or deflation, some might
argue—and his abstraction to ever bolder extremes.
Last time around, at a mere two hours, the slow-burn styliza-
tion of his craftily designed cannibal-supermodel horror show The
Neon Demon (2016) had suggested a perverted pre-Code fantasy,
or a particularly brain-melting episode from the original Outer
Limits meticulously drawn, quartered, and laboriously stretched
to twice its length, thus allowing for full appreciation of its colour-

62
ful, doom-laden atmospherics and psychedelic symbolism. There
were also the expected dollops of explicit sex and gore, part and
parcel for all so-called provocateurs of the festival circuit, as Nic
came to the aid of Lars to keep the Scandinavian end up in the last
decade. More strikingly, the whole shebang was barely dramatized
beyond the chiselled visual level: The Neon Demon qualified as
the most unforgiving application yet of Winding Refn’s latter-day
predilection for affectless acting, whose Brechtian effect has little
to do with Bressonian humanism or Straubian materialism, but
rather an idea of chic, poker-faced intensity as cineastic epipha-
ny—something that plagues the work of many a Kubrick acolyte.
Too Old to Die Young presents ample opportunities to go even
further in that direction, robotic acting included. A sordid crime
plot that Anthony Mann might have done in less than 75 minutes
in the ’40s, and a bit over two hours by the ’60s (and that Michael
Mann, clearly another of Winding Refn’s numerous influences,
would have kept to a trim three hours in the ’90s), is stretched to
non-happening extremes, occasionally garnished with precisely
orchestrated and often spellbinding excesses. In the process, Too
Old to Die Young makes the most laboured art-house gyrations of
Slow Cinema look like puny commercial compromise, inaugurat-
ing (and probably finalizing) what may be called Slow Streaming.
Arguably, it reduces the stream to a trickle, so much so that you’d
be forgiven for expecting buffering marks to show up in the image
during the pregnant pauses (and even in between the tortoise-
tempo enunciations) of each and every dialogue exchange.
All of which makes the result both an abomination and a tri-
umph, considering that this demented auteurist carte-blanche
concoction will basically appeal to a small, self-selected circle of
die-hard Winding Refn fans (like the Cannes selection commit-
tee). The overall chances of accidental viewers sucked into its
crawl-vortex like those sleepless, late-night television gawkers of
the days of yore seem pretty slim, given the small attention span
that reigns on the Net. And yet, functioning almost like an illustra-
tion of Zeno’s paradox that suggests that motion is but an illusion,
Too Old to Die Young scores sympathy points for its refusal to ca-
ter to anything that has made serial TV (and its online successors)
such a mainstream success in the new millennium. It doesn’t even
offer the consoling feeling of popular-subversive art appreciation
that kindred spirit David Lynch coasted upon when returning to
Twin Peaks. Maybe this is also a final emanation of what is consid-
ered auteurist serialism, in the old cinematic sense?
Though co-created by comic artist Ed Brubaker, Too Old to Die
Young proudly boasts the Winding Refn trademark “byNRW,”
which is also the banner affixed to the director’s free streaming
service that spotlights mostly forgotten, and often more than
worthy, cheapo outsider art, some examples of which—e.g., Curtis
Harrington’s Night Tide (1961), Bert Williams’ The Nest of the
Cuckoo Birds (1965)—feature prominently in Winding Refn’s new
project (as do some reliably great, hand-picked song choices, from
country and punk to reggae). And the designation seems to fit: Too
Old to Die Young may well languish as a fringe cult object until
finding a comparable champion decades down the line. Certainly,
the plot and its bizarre details are as silly as the title, yet in patent-
ed Winding Refn fashion, it all unspools with the studied slowness
and visual acumen of a super-refined art installation, wringing
astonishing primary-colour palette ecstasies and compositional
beauty and depth from the most mundane and decrepit set-ups.
(The ultra-digital luxury look should probably be co-credited to
two ace DPs, Darius Khondji and Diego García, whose efforts to
bring splendiferously grand and rich detail to each frame are des-
tined to be wasted on so many small screens.)
As always, Winding Refn maintains a cool distance even while
depicting the most abominable acts, wanting the viewer to shoul-
63
der the moral ambivalence while his characters—trapped in an
unforgiving universe and gradually realizing how their own short-
comings have led them to that trap—wrestle with their demons.
But the creator also crams it down the viewer’s throat (or rather
bores it into her retina and pounds it into her eardrums, aided by
electro-wiz Cliff Martinez) that he’s allowing for koan-like med-
itation on the symbolic and metaphoric signposts he scatters
throughout, starting with each episode’s (or “Volume,” as the nev-
er pretension-averse maker has it) title evoking a tarot card.
Over these ten long hauls of very different durations (31 to 97
minutes, though all but one are over an hour), a couple of stories in-
tersect. Deputy Martin Jones (Miles Teller) witnesses the execu-
tion of his even more corrupt partner by Jesus (Augusto Aguilera),
a cartel kingpin-to-be, in retaliation for the killing of his mother.
While Jones connects with the local underworld for protection,
he becomes an angel of death, set up to follow in the footsteps of
Viggo (John Hawkes), a retired G-man who proudly kills rapists
and pedophiles for a female cult leader (Jena Malone) who dou-
bles as a victim-support officer. In the meantime, Jesus goes to
Mexico, where the cartel’s dying don is about to bequeath his drug-
pushing, girl-selling, all-around-killing enterprise to a designated
successor. For Jesus, there’s also an incestuously motivated mar-
riage with the beautiful Yaritza (Cristina Rodlo), who turns out
to be the “High Priestess of Death,” secretly defying the cartel by
freeing its subjugated women.
Before we waste any time on ideological analysis, whether from
a feminist or a political angle, just take my word for it that any
kind of depravity will be committed and, possibly, be punished,
usually in deliberately paradoxical set-ups. (Despite flirting with
hypnotic boredom, Winding Refn knows the impact of shock val-
ue, right down to the level of style: extended long takes are often
held until the option arises to cut to a particularly disorienting
juxtaposition.) The world becomes a “theme park of death,” as
Jesus fittingly describes his vision of the future, which already
seems to have arrived in the form of Too Old to Die Young. The
director’s announcement that this new project is his reaction to
Trump’s America checks out in the same harebrained way as his
earlier proclamation that his (deserved) first overseas flop, Fear
X (2003), was his reaction to 9/11. Admittedly, Winding Refn’s al-
ienated view of America does adhere to a tradition of Europeans
abroad: one might think of Jacques Deray’s existentialist mas-
terpiece The Outside Man (1972) stretched to the limits, although
Volume Nine’s take-no-prisoners, slo-mo blow-up finale angles for
Antonioni’s famous exit whopper in Zabriskie Point (1970), whose
ludicrous but weighty capital-A-art-grandeur may be more akin to
late Winding Refn than Deray’s casual craftsmanship.
Yet from whichever angle one approaches the whole thing, a
room of policemen chanting “FASCISM!” (yes, in capital letters;
don’t ask), or semi-philosophical monologues about a society get-
ting more psychotic as it gets more perfect, does not an ideologi-
cal analysis make. Rather, the political claim seems one of the red
herrings that provocateur-prankster Winding Refn likes to dis-
seminate more in real life than in his work. His newest, however, is
chock-full with ironic digs at its own laboured, attenuated style: in
one priceless bit, Martin asks a co-conspirator to explain his alleg-
64
edly complicated plan, assuring him that “I’ve got time”; “I don’t.
Life is short,” replies the other. These few sentences are delivered
with such tons-of-tranquilizer-tardiness that they seem to take as
long as an actual discussion of the plan, in detail and taking into
account all eventualities, might take in any more conventionally
fast-paced show.
There’s also a scene in the particularly plot-free and mostly
motionless Volume Two (by which time it has become clear that
all conventional script rules and storytelling necessities will be
willfully abandoned at the auteur’s whim) where the slooooowly
dying don dozes off at the dinner table, and everybody simply waits
for him to regain consciousness. Repeatedly regaling his listeners
with his preferred Pelé anecdote when in command of his senses,
the don is able to conjure a déjà vu of immense power in the viewer
despite his failing health—then again, football is something else
in this parallel world, as evidenced by the assertion that “We’re
not just a cartel, we’re a fuckin’ soccer team!” To this writer, this
remains the most hilarious instance of triggering that peculiar
“Yeah, whatever!” reaction that the whole enterprise seems to
get at time and again, but your mileage may vary: the police de-
partment’s crucifixion re-enactment (plus ukulele gospel) seems
tailor-made for Lynch apostles, while all you William Baldwin
fans are treated to a literally rip-snorting portrait of the hedge-
fund manager as self-proclaimed artiste-pervert (he’s the lecher
dad of the minor that Martin’s been dating for a while).
In short (pun intended), incoherence rates pretty high on the
ingredient list for Too Old to Die Young—maybe only second to
slowness—but purposefully so: the project’s highlights hinge
on counterintuitive gambits like an endless car chase being
show-stoppingly scored to Barry Manilow’s “Mandy.” Meanwhile,
the much-touted violence and sex are yucky in their insinuations
but tame in their presentation, by Winding Refn standards. Does it
matter, as the director tinkers away at a universe whose relation to
the human world is allegorical at best? After all, only his still-great
Pusher trilogy (1996-2005) was, despite all its bold hyperbole,
based on interaction with an idea of realism. In between, Bleeder
(1999) and Fear X already announced a retreat towards abstract-
ed visions, with Bleeder the analysis and Fear X the parable of life
deformed by images.
There’s a short break in the filmography with Winding Refn’s
previous TV commission, Agatha Christie’s Miss Marple (2007),
which, while stylistically a mostly work-for-hire, was part of an
intriguing revisionist agenda (in this case, moving away from the
tradition of Christie orthodoxy). Only afterwards did Winding
Refn set himself up as a leading exponent of Extreme Slow Genre
Cinema, with Bronson (2008), the pagan-spiritualist break-
through of Valhalla Rising (2009), and then with the increasing
formalism of this decade, which was alternately praised (Drive,
2011) or condemned (Only God Forgives, 2013). With the likes of
S. Craig Zahler and Panos Cosmatos closing in on him, Winding
Refn has, for better or worse, expanded even further, and seem-
ingly without compromising in the slightest. Also, considering
that the artist’s meagre revenue on Amazon is measured per
streamed hour, he may have hit on a sensible business model
after all.

Compulsively Yours
(including a few real-life confessions/admissions)
Although I’m no longer a member of Il
Cinema Ritrovato’s DVD jury, two other visi-
tors to Bologna in June who are familiar with
this column presented me with new DVDs:
1. A year ago in this column, while cele-
brating Edition Filmmuseum’s PAL DVD
release of Max Ophüls’ Liebelei (1933) and
the German version of his 1955 Lola Montez
(which I misspelled as Lola Montès, the title
of the French version), I registered the mi-
nor complaint that the “bilingual” booklet,
which I hoped would explain how and why
Marcel Ophüls finally withdrew his obscure
objection to the German version (which I re-
gard as the best version, above all for its col-
ours), was only in German. It turns out that
this lapse was just a printing error, and the
corrected bilingual version of this two-disc
set is now available. (Furthermore, I gather
that the withdrawn objections of Ophüls fils
were basically a matter of money.) Combined
with the recent and long-overdue publica-
tion of François Truffaut’s Chronique d’Arts
Spectacles 1954-1958—Gallimard’s collec-
Global Discoveries on DVD | By Jonathan Rosenbaum
tion of his texts for a prominent right-wing
weekly that, in the opinion of some French
cinephiles, are superior to his reviews for
Cahiers du Cinéma, and which includes some
rapturous writing about Lola Montès (the
French version), including praise for its “[un]
natural” colours—this makes me want to re-
see the German version yet again.
2. Due to my recorded enthusiasm for
Maurizio Nichetti’s first slapstick feature,
Ratataplan (1979), and his no less loony and
hilarious fifth, The Icicle Thief (1989), I was
handed a restoration of his equally loony
but less hilarious third, Domani si balla!
(Tomorrow We Dance, 1983), co-starring
Nichetti and Mariangela Melato, on a PAL
DVD with optional English subtitles (not al-
ways idiomatic or grammatical) released by
Collana Forum Italia. The film was described
to me as an homage to Méliès, but unfortu-
nately the charming Méliès pastiche occurs
only behind the opening credits and then
recurs briefly towards the end. The remain-
der of the movie has something to do with
an independent TV news crew (Nichetti and
Melato) stumbling upon extraterrestrials
(the Mélièsian cutouts) who like to dance,
and who persuade earthlings to dance as
well. This clearly has as much social satire as
Nichetti’s first and fifth forays, but I suspect
that it’s less funny to me because its targets
are more specifically and locally Italian (and
the synthetic ditty they keep dancing to is
more irritating than energizing). But at least
this movie is as weird as the other two. And
poetry, as we know, is what often gets lost
in translation.
***
In Paris after Bologna, I wound up pur-
chasing Maurice Lemaître’s Nos stars and Le
petit Dieu (both 2002) on a multi-region DVD
from Lowave. (One side of the DVD is NTSC,
the other side is PAL.) If you don’t know who
Lemaître (1926-2018) was, proceed at once to
mauricelemaitre.org, and if you want a strong
sample of cinematic Lettrism circa 1950, go to
Isidore Isou’s Treatise on Venom and Eternity
at vimeo.com/ondemand/Isidore and plunk
65
 down $4.98. (It’s worth it—and if you don’t
believe me, check out the free trailer). But
accessing Lemaitre’s seminal 1951 Le film
est déjà commencé (Has the Movie Started
Yet?) online may, alas, be impossible, even
if Lemaître himself used to be wholly ac-
cessible, and delightful to hang out with, at
many of Nicole Brenez’s Paris screenings of
French experimental cinema that I attended.
But Lowave’s DVD offers a heady whiff of his
personality and unique artistic sensibility,
including an “interview” that is really just a
sort of home movie of him revisiting some of
his childhood haunts.
***
A screening of Jacques Tourneur’s blaz-
ing Way of a Gaucho (1952) in an excellent
35mm print was one of the highlights of my
Bologna viewing, and some of my contacts
informed me that an impressive French DVD
of Le Gaucho (the same film) in Bertrand
Tavernier’s superb Western de Legende PAL
DVD series was available. After much hunt-
ing around in Paris, I finally landed it; you
can also buy it from French Amazon for 9.97
euros. Be forewarned that the French sub-
titles aren’t optional, and the lengthy and
informative introductions offered by both
Tavernier and Patrick Brion aren’t subtitled
at all. But the movie looks great.
***
Catherine Breillat practically begins her
fascinating and unusually frank and funny
interview on Second Sight’s Region B Blu-
ray of Romance (1999)—an extra that already
makes this release worth the 14.26 quid ask-
ing price at Amazon UK—by declaring that
even though she’s a feminist in her daily life,
she isn’t political at all when she makes films;
almost 20 minutes later, she ends the inter-
view by insisting that Romance is political. In
between, she admits that she went to great
lengths to acquire a virtually unknown,
flat-chested, and not especially attractive
actress for the film’s female lead and a well-
known Italian porn star for one of her male
leads in this hardcore sex film that was con-
ceived as anti-porn, a contradiction that she
fully acknowledges.
My overall support for Romance, ambiva-
lences and all (some of it I treasure as porn,
some of it I treasure as anti-porn), was ex-
66
pressed in my contemporary review for the
Chicago Reader, some relevant snippets of
which are included below:
“[S]exual and philosophical conventions
ultimately become film conventions. It’s pos-
sible, for instance, that the wordless open-
ing sequence of the Western  Rio Bravo—the
freedom to rely on images alone—is intrinsi-
cally American, as are the taciturn qualities
of Western types ranging from Gary Cooper
to Clint Eastwood. And it’s equally possible
that the offscreen narrators who play such
a key role in French cinema, fiction films
and documentaries alike, reflect a reliance
on spoken language that’s quintessentially
French—a conviction that images are nev-
er quite enough to explain or bear witness
to the world, coupled with a taste for poetry
that prefers the high-flown to the mundane
and the exalted to the merely expository. Yet
this conviction doesn’t typically yield a split
between mind and body; rather it creates a
kind of musical counterpoint, a dance per-
formed by the two, and, at least to my taste,
a sensuality of thought—an idea at odds with
the American notion that thought is an alter-
native to feeling and action.
“…Assuming that both the body and the
mind can profit from being challenged,
and that the challenges of one don’t nec-
essarily negate the challenges of the oth-
er,  Romance  offers a lot to think about and
play with. We’d be fools to reject this bounty
out of hand—unless we really are the mid-
dle-class cowards some reviewers assume
we are.”
***
My fond memories of writer-director
Allan Moyle’s Pump Up the Volume (1990)
led me to ask for a review copy of the Kino
Lorber Blu-ray of The Gun in Betty Lou’s
Handbag (1992), which Moyle directed (very
adroitly) from a script by Grace Cary Bickley.
It’s a comedy-thriller about a neglected,
mousy librarian (Penelope Ann Miller) who
confesses to a sleazy motel murder she didn’t
commit so that her cop husband (Eric Thal)
will finally notice her—a concept about as
silly as Nichetti’s extraterrestrial dance dis-
ease (I wonder how many Italians will laugh
at it), but Moyle, Bickley, and a spirited sec-
ondary cast (which includes Julianne Moore,
Alfre Woodard, Cathy Moriarty, and Meat
Loaf, among others) all make the most of it.
 Aleksei German’s Khrustalyov, My Car!
(1998) has just been released in a limited edi-
tion Blu-ray box set by Arrow Academy, a UK
label that threatens, on occasion, to match
or surpass the stateside Criterion at some of
their own games. What’s exhilarating to me
about this all-region package (going for 27.73
quid at Amazon UK) is how much it man-
ages to explain, and thereby dissipate, the
difficulties in one of the most exciting and
vexing Russian masterpieces of the modern
era by explicating many of the historical con-
ditions that gave rise to it. There’s only one
disc in the box, but that disc contains—along
with a restoration of the 150-minute feature
in two-channel stereo—an audio commen-
tary by Daniel Bird, a detailed 26-minute
audiovisual essay by Eugenie Zvonkine, a 44-
minute feature by Russian historian
Jonathan Brent about the “Doctors’ Plot”
(the fallacious conspiracy that forms the
crux of the film’s narrative), and a 47-minute
interview with German by the late Ron
Holloway. There’s also a 58-page booklet and
a two-sided foldout poster.
***
Another example of a very fine bonus:
on KimStim’s Blu-ray of Raúl Ruiz’s Time
Regained (1999), Bernard Génin’s compre-
hensive and intelligent 23-minute criti-
cal review of all the major attempts to film
Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu, in-
cluding Génin’s evaluations of the projected
casts of some of the unrealized projects. (He
thinks Marlon Brando would have made the
ideal Baron de Charlus in Luchino Visconti’s
prospective version, but I’ve always thought
that Peter Sellers could have been ideal in an-
yone’s version.) I was delighted to hear Génin
report that “someone” told Ruiz about an ar-
ticle celebrating the cinematographic prop-
erties of Proust in La Revue du Cinéma (the
precursor of Cahiers du Cinéma), because
that “someone” was me—although, to be fair,
other friends of Raúl likely told him about it
as well.
***
On Criterion’s top-notch Blu-ray edition
of David Mamet’s House of Games (1987),
the extras are almost as good as the mov-
ie—Mamet’s first feature, and still his best.
On the other hand, I enjoyed rewatching
Lawrence Kasdan’s small-town comedy
Mumford (1999), just released on a Kino
Lorber Blu-ray, at least 15 times more than
I enjoyed watching and listening to Kasdan
drone on in a very nasal voice about why the
film was personally important to him—for
20 minutes, no less. (To tell the truth, I only
made it through the first half of this.)
***
Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s
110-minute Gone to Earth (1950) is thankful-
ly included as an extra on Kino Lorber’s Blu-
ray of David O. Selznick’s 86-minute road-
show version of the film, The Wild Heart
(1952), put together for us clueless Yanks.
But this being America, it’s the skim job—
which adds a pointless overture and then an
insulting voiceover to the opening sequence
that explains what any viewer can figure out
for herself—that gets the star billing and cat-
alogue listing. Gone to Earth has never been a
favourite item in the Powell corpus of florid,
mythologized period fairy tales, but I found
it enchanting—that is, the first half hour
(or 25 minutes in the Selznicked version),
meanwhile looking forward to savouring the
rest when I don’t have to worry about this
column’s deadline. The colours are as viv-
id as those in the German Lola Montez, and
Jennifer Jones as the daughter of a Gypsy
mother evokes her transgressive charac-
ters in both Duel in the Sun (1946) and Ruby
Gentry (1952), which Luc Moullet wrote about
so effectively in Positif no. 539. (Go to mubi.
com/notebook/posts/the-bravura-sequence
for an English translation of his article.)
***
Apart from George Orwell’s painfully in-
delible original novel from 1948, the best
version of 1984 by far is the one made in 1984
by writer-director Michael Radford, and
what makes it so good is Radford’s brilliant
decision to set it not in some randomly hypo-
thetical or even actual 1984, but in 1948’s and
Orwell’s version of that year, which means
a shabby and war-torn London projected
into Orwell’s sense of the future. In effect,
this means that the film unfolds simultane-
ously in three separate time frames—1948,
Orwell’s 1984, and our 1984—without ever
seeming top-heavy or tricky, and repoliti-
cizes the novel in the process. This isn’t the
film’s only strength: it also includes Richard
Burton’s last film performance (and one of
67
 his best), and the perfect casting of John
Hurt as the lead.
The most striking thing about Criterion’s
excellent Blu-ray edition is the fact that it in-
cludes two soundtrack scores: the original-
ly commissioned and traditional Dominic
Muldowney score, and the rock/pop score by
the Eurythmics that was foisted on the film
against Radford’s wishes. However, the cus-
tomer’s choice isn’t as clear-cut as the one
between Gone to Earth and The Wild Heart,
because Radford now admits that he likes
both scores.
***
In my last column, I attempted to ration-
alize my conversion to streaming and then
writing about it in a column called “Global
Discoveries on DVD” by referencing a
Babylon Berlin box set. Since then, I’ve plowed
through all three seasons to date of The Good
Fight (2017-2019) on CBS for its grasp of real-
life corruptions via a fictional Chicago law
firm (and was amply rewarded, especially
by the uncanny casting of Gina Gershon as
“Melania Trump” in Season Three), then the
first two seasons of Mad Men (2007-2015) on
Netflix, for its enticing critique of Madison
Avenue in the early ’60s as a haven for serial
adultery, workplace sexual abuse, and non-
stop chain smoking, meanwhile ordering a
DVD box set for Season Three while still idly
wondering how much of the show’s clever cri-
tique was actually a nostalgic celebration as
well as a thoughtful condemnation.
Finally, to rationalize my binge-watch-
ing the glorious Crazy Ex-Girlfriend (2015-
2019) on Netflix—a musical sitcom about
an overachieving, neurotic Jewish New
York lawyer named Rebecca Bunch (cowrit-
er Rachel Bloom) resettling in an obscure
corner of California to rekindle her teen-
age romance with a sweet-tempered air-
head named Josh (Vincent Rodriguez III), a
Filipino-American jock—which I belatedly
discovered thanks to a hot tip embedded in
Adrian Martin’s article about “Storytelling
Mutations Between Television and Cinema”
in the Summer 2019 Cineaste (which also in-
cludes a persuasive critique of the way The
Other Side of the Wind got “classically” mise-
dited and misstructured for Netflix), I decid-
ed to order a three-disc DVD set of the third
season while I was still chugging my way
through the second. Unfortunately, my dig-
68
ital setup in the only air-conditioned room
in my flat can’t play five-track audio with-
out muffling or blocking crucial parts of the
sound, which, along with the English subti-
tles option, makes streaming on my laptop
far more congenial, even when I’m using my
hearing aid. But I’m glad I ordered the DVDs
anyway, because the advertising on the back
of the box highlights a vexing issue about
trying to do something subversive in main-
stream media that’s already been bugging
me a lot, and not only in relation to Welles’
defiantly unclassical unfinished feature.
Here’s the deal: at first the flip side of the
Crazy Ex-Girlfriend Season Three box had
me worried because it’s headlined, in full
caps, “REVENGE IS A DISH,” followed by a
lengthy, corroborating dishy text. For me,
“revenge” is the worst word in the lexicon of
contemporary American doublethink—not
only the principal cause of at least two mis-
guided and misbegotten invasions and mili-
tary occupations mislabelled as wars in the
Middle East, and practically the only theme
to be found in the Tarantino playbook, but
the perfect illustration of what makes my
country so disastrously removed from reality
and mired in media fantasies devised for pre-
teen boys who still believe in winners and
losers, good guys and bad guys. I was imme-
diately reminded of my recent look at Henry
King’s The Bravados (1958) on a Twilight
Time Blu-ray, in anticipation of the interest-
ing King retrospective at this year’s edition
of Il Cinema Ritrovato. King, in his wisdom,
decided to critique the macho revenge myth
in our American consciousness, rather like
the way he took apart the macho fastest-gun-
in-the-west myth in The Gunfighter (1950),
for me his key masterpiece. Even if he didn’t
fully succeed in this difficult project, the
nobility of the aim and the sentiment be-
hind it are still evident. But if you look at the
Bravados trailer on the same Blu-ray, you’ll
discover that the Fox people, in their own
wisdom, decided that the best way—actually
the only way—of selling such a movie to the
mainstream is to advertise it as just another
goddamn generic revenge Western, with-
out any irony or second thoughts or regrets.
Case closed.
The same thing applies to Crazy Ex-
Girlfriend’s third season—a devastating
deconstruction of the revenge scenario (at
least for the first four episodes, and then
briefly resumed in the tenth)—and its an-
tithetical marketing label, which tries to
undo and undermine much of the rough
magic. Unfortunately, most of the rest of the
third season mutates from musical sitcom
to straight drama with musical numbers,
turning glum and humourless but without
removing any of the outlandish plot con-
trivances and verbal match cuts designed to
keep the story going. Fortunately, the fourth
season returns joyfully to musical sitcom
with periodic reality checks, topped by a vo-
luptuous performance in the first episode of
“No One Else Is Singing My Song” in a three-
part split-screen of three major characters in
their separate, self-induced miseries singing
it in three-part harmony, which eventually
expands into a 12-part split-screen reprise.
But unfortunately, when Greg Serrano, my
favourite of Rebecca Bunch’s ex-boyfriends,
makes his belated reappearance in Season
Four, he’s no longer being played by the same
actor: Skylar Astin has stepped in to replace
Santino Fontana, and even though the show
tries to finesse this by having Rebecca re-
mark repeatedly how much he’s changed
during his stint at Emory, it’s painfully clear
that he’s no longer the same guy.
And here’s the rub: whereas it’s a plus that
a show so preoccupied with obsessive behav-
iour as a contagious disease—with Rebecca
as the infector and her paralegal pal Paula
(Donna Lynne Champlin), who is as impor-
tant to the series as Rebecca, boss Darryl
(Pete Gardner), neighbour Heather (Vella
Lovell), romantic rival Valencia (Gabrielle
Ruiz), and at least three of Rebecca’s boy-
friends among the infectees—can only
be seriously accessed by obsessive binge-
watching, any show with 62 episodes add-
ing up to 40-plus hours is bound to have its
peaks and canyons, with a certain number
of desperate trial balloons and lazy retreads
concocted just to keep the whole shebang
moving. And these low points have a lamen-
table cumulative effect of jeopardizing the
show’s progressive agenda of showing that
even fucked-up sitcom characters feeding
on and replicating, or else rekindling and/
or exposing, one another’s obsessions are
capable of growth and other kinds of positive
development. In short, the sitcom template
of dependably unchangeable quirks (a busi-
ness model of how to stay in business) con-
flicts with the ethical and artistic model of
showing how those quirks can be overcome.
This leads to an overall stalemate in terms
of business, art, and ethics—hence the show
ending after four seasons with a conclusive-
ly non-conclusive bit of self-referentiality,
followed by a very showbizzy live concert of
selected numbers from the show, with the ac-
tors finally using their own names and some-
thing that resembles triumphant exhaustion
more than any kind of completion.
Even so, what makes Crazy Ex-Girlfriend
so irreplaceable isn’t just its creative cin-
ematic smarts and its witty wordplay, but
also its accurate depiction of The Way We
Live Now—hopefully referencing here some-
thing more than a middle-class “we” (i.e.,
those who can afford Netflix), but that’s
what makes the more downscale Paula and
the show’s evolving sense of community so
important—which we don’t find in many
theatrical movies these days. (An exception:
wait for Patrick Wang’s two-part A Bread
Factory, which Michael Sicinski wrote about
in Cinema Scope 78 and which Grasshopper
Films will eventually be bringing out in a
take-home format.) Of course, it’s entirely
possible that a show predicated on a seeming
inability to outgrow adolescent traumas and
disappointments, apart from saying some-
thing creepy about the US (or is it the world?)
as a whole, is pushing all my buttons because
it’s saying something creepy about me too
(pun intended? I haven’t yet figured that one
out). Yet it’s still a plus when you can start ap-
plying the lessons of a show to the world you
live in, not just the world you dream about.
Pace Adrian Martin, Crazy Ex-Girlfriend
may qualify as “vulgar postmodernism,” but
that doesn’t prevent it from having more to
say about the real world and real-life issues
than Mad Men and The Good Fight combined.
Unlike what I’ve sampled of Rachel
Bloom’s music videos—whose dirty lyrics
and revisionist takes on Ray Bradbury, The
Wizard of Oz, and Disney cartoons don’t
impress me much except as early tryouts—
CEG’s panoply of female-oriented sexual/
anatomical details (from “period sex” to
yeast infections), texting, Instagram and
other social media, pharmaceutical fren-
zies, and multiple romantic self-deceptions,
along with her sexually and racially diverse
characters, including a gay jock and two bi-
sexuals (one of whom performs a number
called ”Getting Bi”), and one of the hero-
ine’s eventual flatmates (Clark Moore’s AJ)
whose gender and sexual orientation are
never established, are consistently funny,
fresh, and real. Indeed, towards the end of
the first season, there are moments when
the various misalignments of desires and
impulses become positively Proustian, but
here it’s the fantasies planted or harvested
by movies and other TV shows or ads rather
than the conceits of literature that provide
all the templates. (There’s even a mention
of Don Draper in the fifth episode of CEG’s
first season, and another Mad Men reference
in the second episode of Season Four.) These
templates are all spelled out deliciously in
the musical numbers, including even some
allusions to specific models (e.g., the won-
derful “Settle for Me” channels Astaire and
Rodgers, “Love’s Not a Game” is a direct steal
from Guys and Dolls’ “Luck Be a Lady,” and
“The Math of Love Triangles” alludes more
indirectly to Marilyn Monroe’s “Diamonds
Are a Girl’s Best Friend” in Gentlemen Prefer
Blondes). Crazy is, above all, a very astute
form of media criticism (see, for instance,
the musical number “Slow Motion” in Season
Four, Episode 15) enhanced by a genuine
cinematic intelligence—by which I mean,
among many other things, the editing (in-
cluding all the Straubian cuts to black lead-
er), the timing of the shot changes in the mu-
sical numbers, and the diverse rhyme effects
in the crosscutting subplots. (I’m talking
about découpage, not mise en scène, which
is far less important in this series.) Even
when the comic situations become absurd-
ly contrived and/or simply formulaic, some
emotional truths about doublethink and its
painful consequences always leak through.
And I hasten to add that this show creat-
ed by two women, Bloom and Aline Brosh
McKenna, offers a uniquely female perspec-
tive on all its themes and stresses that I ha-
ven’t seen anywhere else. Maybe my taste
for autocritique that accounts for much of
my reverence for Welles and Stroheim leads
me to this hyperbole, but something tells me
that Bloom and McKenna are working out
some of their own personal issues, and their
honest fidelity to those issues is what makes
them mine.
69
Fire Will Come
Oliver Laxe, Spain/France/Luxembourg
After two films set in Morocco—You Are
BY AZADEH JAFARI All Captains (2010) and the Cannes Critics
Week winner Mimosas (2016)—French-born
Spanish filmmaker Oliver Laxe returns to
his parents’ homeland of Galicia for his third
feature, Fire Will Come, which the director
has called a “dry melodrama.” The narrative
is certainly simple enough: a middle-aged
man, Amador (Amador Arias), recently re-
leased from prison after serving two years
for setting fire to the woods, returns home
and resumes his solitary, monotonous life
with his aged mother, Benedicta (Benedicta
Sanchez), on the small farm that they share
with a dog and three cows. “Dryness,” how-
ever, could also connote combustibility, and
as the camera repeatedly surveys the strik-
ingly beautiful yet menacing landscapes of
the Galician heights—thickly forested with
trees charged with the potential energy to
burst into flame, whether from natural or
manmade causes—Laxe draws an analogy
between nature and human nature, both of
which carry within them the power of de-
struction, and self-destruction.
The film opens with a breathtaking, night-
marishly nocturnal prologue, as the camera
slowly moves through the trees, their leaves
blowing in the wind to the sound of crickets.
Suddenly, the tall eucalyptus trees start fall-
ing one by one as if being crushed by some un-
seen force; a few seconds later, the rumbling
on the soundtrack and the dim light entering
from frame left announces the appearance of
a bulldozer, moving inexorably through on
its destructive course. As the machines pass
through the frame and their sound gradually
fades away, DP Mauro Herce’s camera begins
to move directly into the heart of darkness
that remains on screen, closely observing the
70
bark of an old tree as Vivaldi’s setting of “Nisi
Dominus—Cum Dederit” begins to play, the
combination of sound and image conveying
amorphous but powerful feelings of sadness,
fear, and grandeur. The sequence feels other-
worldly, and is certainly more stylized than
the rest of the film that follows. What Laxe
achieves here, however, is an elegant, meta-
phorical fusion of physical and mental land-
scapes. The forceful imagery could, perhaps,
be read as a representation of a damaged
person’s psyche, sombre, unreadable, and
vulnerable to attack by mysterious forces be-
yond its control.
Following this brief glimpse into (what
could be) his protagonist’s inner life, Laxe
returns to the signature mode he developed
through You Are All Captains and Mimosas:
an exclusive use of non-professional actors,
which ties in naturally to the restrained,
surfacely unemotional tone he favours, and
an avoidance of overt stylization in favour
of capturing the unrehearsed, slow-paced
rhythms of everyday life. Through the care-
ful application of these methods, Laxe is able
to extract his fictions through documentary
verisimilitude, constructing impressive-
ly detailed human portraits without overt
excursions into his characters’ psycholog-
ical depths or even any explicit detail about
their pasts.
Of course, the success of this technique is
predicated upon the precise selection of his
subjects, and Laxe does exceptionally well
with his two principals here. Evincing an
innate affection for both his performers and
the characters they play, Laxe patiently cap-
tures those singularities of gesture, expres-
sion, and posture that can elevate the simple
“being-ness” of non-professional actors into
expressive performance. Arias, with his tac-
iturn face and sad, piercing eyes, is ideal as
Amador, a man who at first seems incapable
of the most simple of human interactions,
even with his patient mother. By contrast,
Sanchez, with her wrinkled, affectionate
face, hushed voice, and childlike posture,
wordlessly conveys the impression of an old
woman who is at harmony with the world
around her and imbued with an uncondi-
tional love for her troubled son, turning her
tiny body into a towering presence within
the film.
As noted above, Laxe is sparing with de-
tails about what happened to Amador and
Benedicta in the past or what spurred Amador
to his act of arson, apart from some vague
mention from other locals about the fact that
mother and son had suffered through great
hardship. What ultimately ignites a new,
burning fury in Amador, however, begins as
a glimmer of hope: an opportunity to bridge
the wide gap he feels between himself and
all around him. That hope comes in the form
of a potential romance with Elena (Elena
Fernandez), a kind veterinarian who rescues
Amador’s sick cow and then drives both the
heifer and its owner back to town in her pick-
up truck. After exchanging a few words with
her mostly unresponsive passenger, Elena
plays Leonard Cohen’s “Suzanne” on the
car radio. The music seems to deeply affect
Amador, perhaps awakening a long-dormant
well of emotion—but, true to his allusive
method, Laxe cuts away to the cow rumbling
along in the truck’s flatbed, the sun-kissed
mountains in the background as the soft song
continues to play on the soundtrack.
Some days later, Amador takes out a pair
of new shoes from a box, puts them on with
a clean outfit, and drives in to the town, pre-
sumably to see Elena. He sits in a café, shyly
looking at her as she talks cheerfully with
her friends; seeing him, she comes over to
say hello, but doesn’t sit at his table. As the
camera holds on his cold, hardened face,
Vivaldi’s “Nisi Dominus” starts to play again.
A cut takes us back to Benedicta in her home,
where she suddenly seems overwhelmed
and worried; she goes out to the meadow to
search for her dog, as if she has anticipat-
ed some approaching disaster. We then see
Amador driving as fire trucks speed past him
in the opposite direction, heading towards
the blazing wildfire in the distance.
The meticulously prepared ambiguity of
the wildfire sequence, our inability to ascer-
tain whether Amador is guilty or not, emerg-
es organically from the potential blurring of
material and mental spaces in Laxe’s pro-
logue. On a literal level, Amador’s presence
near the blaze may have been a sheer coin-
cidence; on another level, it is conceivable
that his inner rage may have manifested it-
self physically. The blurring of these modes
of perception is further complicated by the
intense actuality of the images: Laxe and his
crew waited more than two months for an ac-
tual wildfire to break out in the drought- and
heat-ravaged hills of Galicia, then plunged
into the inferno to capture dazzling and
terrifying footage of ash and flame. The se-
quence is like a document of the apocalypse,
complete with some found surreality: two
goats wandering in the kitchen of an aban-
doned house; a blinded horse stumbling
through the scorched landscape.
In the film’s final scene, Amador walks
nonchalantly down the street in the vil-
lage, where he is accosted by a local, Inazio
(Inazio Abrao), who had once defended him
to the other villagers but now furiously at-
tacks him, along with some of the other vil-
lage men. Amador doesn’t fight back, uncom-
plainingly taking the beating until Benedicta
arrives. Her silence alone is enough to make
the angry men feel ashamed of themselves,
and they relent in their assault. As mother
and son walk away, Benedicta tries to console
the tormented Amador. “If they hurt others,
it is because they are hurt too,” she had once
said of the giant eucalyptus trees. Given the
inscrutable but obvious depths of his pain,
one can’t help but wonder how Amador is
ever going to mend his broken pride and sad,
scorched heart.
71
No Data Plan
Miko Revereza, US
In The United States of America (1975), James
BY ERIKA BALSOM Benning and Bette Gordon take a trip across
the country, from east to west. Structural
film meets the road movie, as a 16mm camera
is mounted in the backseat of their car, fac-
ing forward, taking in the passing terrain as
it’s framed by the windshield. The couple sits
in the front, their bodies positioned solidly
between the lens and the land, ever visible in
the frame but yielding no personal informa-
tion. In the car, with the radio on, they speed
together through the expanses of America,
the land of the free.
Over 40 years later, Miko Revereza’s first
feature film No Data Plan makes a similar
journey, albeit in reverse, beginning in Los
Angeles and ending in New York. Or per-
haps it is not so similar: perhaps everything
about this second coast-to-coast experi-
ment is different from the first, everything
regarding the circumstances of the trip and
the strategies and motivations for filming it.
In No Data Plan, the artist-traveller looks
to Instagram rather than the radio for com-
panionship, and captures his journey on a
small digital camera rather than on film.
Benning and Gordon’s rigorous conceptu-
alism softens, as Revereza adopts a mixed
formal vocabulary and introduces both fa-
milial narrative and snippets of strangers’
conversations, using voiceless subtitles and
voiceover. His body all but vanishes from
the frame. And most importantly, Revereza
moves across the country not in the private
enclosure of the automobile—that powerful
symbol of independence, freedom, and in-
dividualism—but aboard Amtrak. The film
consists almost entirely of shots of the train
and its environs: platforms, waiting rooms,
carriages, landscapes framed through
dirty windowpanes.
Yes, everything is different. But No Data
Plan is no less an atlas of America than
Benning and Gordon’s beautiful film. It is one
72
that knows that the carefree mobility found
in their collaboration is a privilege. Revereza
travels by Amtrak not out of nostalgia, aero-
phobia, or ecological awareness, but out of ne-
cessity, as he lacks the requisite documents to
fly. No Data Plan is a documentary of and by
the undocumented, bookended by an Amtrak
employee asking to see identification and a
barely avoided run-in with Border Patrol of-
ficers. Revereza was born in the Philippines,
moving to California with his family in 1993
at the age of five. He shot the film while resid-
ing in the country illegally, with expired pa-
pers conferred through Deferred Action for
Childhood Arrivals (DACA), a program the
Trump administration seeks to terminate.
No Data Plan is a diary created out of this
condition, emanating from the non-place of
extended transit. This transit is most obvi-
ously the three-day journey across the coun-
try, but it is also the transit of a whole life, a
whole family. The film was made in response
to a time when the filmmaker’s ostensible
home has become increasingly, unlivably
inhospitable. As Revereza put it, “This film
came out of very real conditions of state-
lessness and fugitivism, boredom and con-
finement—micro-personal nuances of the
undocumented experience that aren’t visible
or represented in media.” This concern man-
ifests in a quiet accretion of detail: worries
that using a data plan will enable surveillance
by Immigrations and Customs Enforcement
(ICE), familial rifts and bonds, foil packets of
mayonnaise in the dining car, a Bard College
lanyard pressed into service as a prop in the
performance of legal belonging. The insig-
nificant and important collide. Reverza pro-
claims the right to the everyday, inflecting
it with the lived experience of displacement
and injustice.
In the 19th century, as historian Wolfgang
Schivelbusch has shown, the railroad was
thought to make “travel space” disappear.
Aboard this emblem of modernity, the ground
between here and there would vanish, as
the locomotive reorganized conceptions of
distance and proximity, annihilating space
and time. In America at least, the airplane has
long usurped this role, leaving long-distance
train travel as something outmoded and inef-
ficient in a country that accords special value
to precisely the opposite. Revereza reimagines
the cinematic iconography of the train ac-
cordingly, turning away from any association
with speed or romance—familiar from the
Lumières to Keaton, Hitchcock to Ophüls—to
forge a portrait of passenger railways fit for
the 21st century. Dwelling in the liminal space
between departure and arrival, he recasts the
train journey as a durational experience of
worn bodies and impersonal environments.
As Revereza winds through so-called flyover
states, taking in Amtrak’s underfunded in-
frastructure, its workers and passengers, he
crafts a vision of America as a country bleak
and lonely, devoid of collectivity.
No Data Plan is, in one regard, a film of
tremendous externality, replete with images
of unhomely public spaces largely emptied
of people. Revereza films things more than
faces, but even as the film consistently at-
tends to the concrete materiality of the train
carriage and its surroundings, it equally
conceives of this space more figuratively, as
a vehicle of psychic transport. The train of
No Data Plan evokes a paradoxical sense of
containment and uprootedness that rhymes
with the experience of living without pa-
pers. Habitual patterns of sleep and wake-
fulness fade, making way for a threshold
state of consciousness in which fragments
of family life emerge and recede, pierce and
blur, possessing the haze of dreams and the
weight of reality.
These episodes are relayed periodical-
ly through voiceover narration and patient
subtitles correlating to no audible voice, with
the latter responsible for a great measure of
the sense of subjective interiority Revereza
achieves. Through subtitling, a device irrev-
ocably wedded to notions of foreignness and
translation, the filmmaker conveys stories of
his mother’s life, his parents’ separation, and
his extended family’s past in the Philippines.
Like Ocean Vuong’s new novel On Earth
We’re Briefly Gorgeous, No Data Plan is,
among other things, the work of an immi-
grant son of the ’80s who reckons with an ex-
ilic family history and, more particularly, his
mother’s hardships and attachments within
it. However different Revereza’s film is from
Vuong’s novel, both weld brute facticity to
poetic abstraction. The feeling that No Data
Plan is engaged in internal narration reaches
its apex in the inclusion of images of the ar-
rivals gate at the Manila airport, the sole mo-
ment the film departs from the iconography
of Amtrak. Although these are nonfiction
scenes, shot by Rafael Luna, they resonate
as Revereza’s mental images, like a phantas-
matic return to a home-that-is-not-home, re-
alizable now only in imagination, and in the
future only on the condition of being denied
re-entry into that other home-that-is-not-
home, the US.
The border is not just where the US touch-
es Canada and Mexico: as Étienne Balibar
explains, borders are “no longer entirely sit-
uated at the outer limit of territories; they
are dispersed a little everywhere, wherever
the movement of information, people, and
things is happening and controlled.” No
Data Plan maps the dispersal of the border
across the entirety of a country ever more
forcefully controlling such movements. In
documenting the experience of being un-
documented, the film is a fierce assertion of
presence; simultaneously, it punctures dear-
ly held American mythologies of opportunity
and mobility. To be sure, the violence of the
border is potently concentrated at certain
sites, such as checkpoints and camps. But
far from the atrocities that deservedly make
headlines, the first-person gaze of No Data
Plan captures the border’s more banal oper-
ations—operations that, however quotidian
they may be, nevertheless exert an immense
psychic and material toll on those subjected
to them. Permeating every corner of life, the
border is always there. It haunts an emergen-
cy exit sign on the train, colours the sight of
a white SUV, and even soaks into a strange
phrase emblazoned on a stranger’s jacket:
“adventure / explore new ways / anywhere
/ no question.” Does the man who wears this
coat know that he walks through the world
issuing a brazen promise his country will
never keep?
73
The Traitor
Marco Bellocchio, Italy/France/Brazil/Germany

BY CELLULOID LIBERATION FRONT
“The most beautiful film is our own history,”
confessed Marco Bellocchio to a journalist
following the release of The Traitor, after it
surpassed Godzilla: King of the Monsters at
the Italian box office, proving yet again that
the Mafia movie is still a commodity worth
investing in. While the adjective “beauti-
ful” might be up for debate, it’s undeniable
that the history of postwar Italy is richer in
plot twists, tragicomic exploits, and violent
assaults on the established order than your
average Hollywood blockbuster. For better
or worse, Italian screenwriters can rely on
an ever-growing database of (sur)real stories
that the most fervid imagination would have
a hard time coming up with. And as the ac-
curately depicted scenes of the Maxi Trial of
Palermo in The Traitor show, Italians retain
their knack for comedic antics in the most
dire and dramatic situations, the court of law
being no exception. Even the darkest chap-
ters of Italian history are often festooned by
clownish episodes where the fine line sep-
arating sheer genius from pure idiocy is in-
deed hard to tell.
It is precisely these surreal episodes that
have more to say about the history of Italy
than its grand narratives. Bellocchio in fact
is hardly interested in the historical dimen-
sion of the Sicilian Mafia or that of its pro-
tagonists: on the contrary, he explores the
phenomenological tics of their lives and,
as always in his cinema, the Oedipal folds
of their psyche. The Traitor discreetly tails
the title character, Tommaso Buscetta (mi-
metically impersonated by Pierfrancesco
Favino), the very first Mafia boss to turn
informer. Whether Bellocchio’s story is fic-
tionalized or factual is beside the point: as
in Good Morning, Night (2003), the director
distorts the original records of history for his
own purposes. History in his films is always
seen and told through the lens of subjectiv-
ity, not because he believes that individuals

74
are the makers of history, but because our
perception of it is inevitably subjective. It’s
for this reason that drawing a parallel be-
tween The Traitor and the films of Francesco
Rosi is ill-advised. Rosi investigated reality
and its affairs, be they current or historical,
in order to denounce the official version—to
expose injustice and even fight it. Bellocchio
is not interested in debunking; quite the con-
trary, as his Buscetta is to a significant extent
the romantic, fictionalized version that the
actual Mafia boss believed himself to be, or
at least wanted the public to believe he was.
The movie takes place at a crucial junc-
ture of the recent history of the Mafia in
Italy, when the rise of the Corleone clan in
the ’80s did away with the Bontade, Inzerillo,
and Badalamenti families. As Ronald Reagan
and Margaret Thatcher did in the US and the
UK respectively in relation to economic pol-
icy, so the Corleones in Sicily presided over
the neoliberal turn of organized crime: no
longer territorially bound, the Cosa Nostra’s
Sicilian roots melted into the global flows
of capital as the Palermo of the ’80s became
one of the epicentres of the drug trade world-
wide. It was against this break with tradition
(and the adding of heroin to the Cosa Nostra’s
portfolio) that Buscetta allegedly “revolted,”
deciding to collaborate with justice. “I’m
still an honourable man,” Buscetta tells the
magistrate Giovanni Falcone (Fausto Russo
Alesi). He represents the real Mafia, the
one that protected poor people; they (the
new guard) have betrayed the unwritten
code of honour which he, and he alone, still
obeys. In Buscetta’s mythological view, the
new guard betrayed the “true values” of the
Cosa Nostra, not him; he’s not the traitor,
they are.
While born on the ruins of poverty and un-
derdevelopment, the Mafia never helped the
poor, let alone defended them; if anything it
exploited them, like any other business en-
terprise would. Organized crime, in Sicily
as elsewhere (see The Wire), profited off of
poverty and can now be found in the highest
accumulations of capital: finance, public in-
frastructures, and real estate. Buscetta’s no-
ble excuse, for all we know, might have been a
reputable exit strategy for someone who, hav-
ing grown accustomed to the lavish lifestyle
of a Copacabana expat, could not face a life-
time in prison. (Lovers of conspiracy claim
that informers are nothing but pawns in the
manipulative hands of the Mafia itself, mere-
ly serving the logic of their internal power
struggles). What is certain is that inform-
ers, the protagonist of The Traitor included,
start talking after their arrest—which is why
Buscetta’s claim that he ratted on his former
colleagues because the Cosa Nostra wasn’t
what it used to be anymore sounds prepos-
terous, to say the least. But factual truth isn’t
what Bellocchio wants to stage: rather, he’s
interested in the ordinary unfolding of a sup-
posedly epic life whose narrative peaks are
frustrated by anti-climactic counterpoints.
The film is dynamically suspended between
the pathos of rise and fall and the monotony
of daily life, though punctually subdued and
understated; it flows like a Homeric poem.
What is rendered in aesthetic and narrative
terms reflects a vision of men cornered by
events despite their status.
The characters of Bellocchio’s cinema are
always dwarfed by history, like Mussolini
and his illegitimate son in Vincere (2009).
For all his historical weight, Buscetta ul-
timately follows a script he hasn’t written.
His confession to Falcone across a desk di-
vides them symbolically, each on a different
side of the law. While on trial, he sits next to
his former colleague Pippo Calò (Fabrizio
Ferracane), literally sharing the stage on
which their dissension is acted out, loudly
and flamboyantly. The court of law is turned
into commedia dell’arte, and it’s in this par-
ticular regard that Bellocchio’s oneiric
trademark, which has usually brought the
surreal out of the real, is almost surpassed by
reality itself, and thus “forced” back into the
folds of realism. Rather than the “most beau-
tiful,” Italian history is the most improbable:
Italy is possibly the only country of the so-
called first world within which a supposedly
developed democracy coexisted and even-
tually merged with a criminal organization
the likes of which are usually associated with
underdevelopment. In dramatic terms, this
political anomaly has gifted Italy with an ar-
senal of poetic devices, thanks to which the
difference between the scripted and the im-
provised has often vanished. Things in Italy
(and in the film) can simultaneously be tragic
and yet never serious, bloody but still farci-
cal. Deflated of their aura, the family wars
that restructured the hierarchy of the Cosa
Nostra in the early ’80s are as breathtaking
as a company merger agreed upon in front of
a corporate lawyer.
The only victim of this violent farce, more
than an imaginary democratic order, is the
romantic notion of the family that even to-
day permeates the rhetorical idea of Italy.
Blood in The Traitor is not the sacred bond
through which criminal business is conduct-
ed, but its expendable currency. Buscetta has
two families, one in Sicily and one in Brazil,
and both of them are incidental to his pro-
fessional trajectory, at times even obstacles:
when a business associate begs him to return
to Sicily before his enemies take it out on his
family, Buscetta instead stays put in Rio de
Janeiro, fully aware that his relatives will
pay the price for him. Family in his calcu-
lations is never a priority, always an after-
thought: as Friedrich Engels outlined in The
Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the
State, familial bonds in the Mafia are trans-
actional functions that can be reconfigured
at any time, like the organizational chart of
a corporation.
Once Buscetta starts collaborating with
the justice system, his Sicilian family dis-
owns him. “He’s not a Buscetta anymore,
he’s not worthy of his name,” his sister shouts
to the reporters crowded at her doorstep.
The love and loyalty of his Brazilian fami-
ly are simply dictated by contingencies, as
much as is the hatred of his Sicilian family.
The family is, for all intents and purposes,
a moralistic cover that is blown every time
its financial rationale ceases to make sense.
Disingenuously framed in ethical terms, the
Mafia is primarily a mercantile phenome-
non, and its folkloristic ornaments have in
fact changed along with the global economy.
If anything, Buscetta represents the anthro-
pological passage from a Cosa Nostra histor-
ically linked to a territory and its customs
to one projected onto the global stage, freed
from the burden of tradition and free to min-
gle with other “respectable” forms of busi-
ness. Whether naively or opportunistically,
his refusal to embrace the new era is only
valuable as a narrative device, one through
which this epochal change is observed with
analytical detachment.
75
Light From Light
Paul Harrill, US
BY LAWRENCE GARCIA
76
On the occasion of last year’s Big Ears
Festival, an annual showcase of film and mu-
sic in Knoxville, Tennessee, writer-director
Paul Harrill curated “A Sense of Place,” a pro-
gram of American independent films ground-
ed in regional idiosyncrasies and often real-
ized on the micro-budget level—a lineage
that his own work very much falls within.
Selections included now-classic titles such
as Herk Harvey’s Utah-shot Carnival of Souls
(1962) and Eagle Pennell’s lo-fi, Austin-set
The Whole Shootin’ Match (1978), the latter of
which Robert Redford once cited as his inspi-
ration for starting the Sundance Institute. It
might seem appropriate, then, that Harrill’s
new feature Light From Light premiered at
Sundance earlier this year, nearly two dec-
ades after his short Gina, An Actress, Age 29
won the festival’s Jury Prize in 2001. And
yet, as hardly requires mentioning, the kind
of American independents championed by
the festival has altered significantly since
that time: its selections increasingly behold-
en to commercial demands, pungent peculi-
arities shorn away in the search for broader
appeal. Thus Harrill’s personal, regionally
rooted vision—his films are mostly set in or
around East Tennessee—has been all but rel-
egated to the margins, in a festival that was
once dedicated to the very same.
That sense of being out of step with the
times, though, comes part and parcel with
Harrill’s governing interests. Even the
fact that his previous feature, Something,
Anything (2014), explicitly engaged with the
religious milieu of the South, already made
it feel less than au courant in an era mostly
split between avowedly secular offerings
and “faith-based” dreck. Harrill’s preoccu-
pations with matters of faith and spiritual-
ity might bear comparison to the latter-day
films of Terrence Malick, but there is no an-
alogue in his work for the fragmented rush-
es of experience in Knight of Cups (2015) or
Song to Song (2017): largely bereft of formal
ostentation, his films are attendant to the
everyday, to human behaviour as it is inflect-
ed by the particulars of place, to rhythms
aimed at creating an air of quiet revelation.
Like its predecessor, Light From Light could
thus be dismissed as “conventional,” but, giv-
en the nature of prevailing cinematic tastes,
this mostly means that its form has less in
common with the ascetic rigour of contem-
porary fest-circuit favourites than with the
classical construction of Leo McCarey or
Frank Borzage—spiritually inclined direc-
tors whose influence Harrill has not been shy
about acknowledging.
Light From Light follows Sheila (Marin
Ireland), a paranormal investigator current-
ly “between teams,” as she helps Richard
(Jim Gaffigan) inspect his own house, which
he believes may be haunted by the ghost of
his wife, who recently died in a plane crash.
In different hands, this premise could serve
as an occasion for wry detachment or even
outright ridicule, but Harrill plunges the
viewer headlong, earnestly and without con-
descension, into the material realities of his
two soul-sick seekers. “Would you consider
yourself a believer or a skeptic?” a radio in-
terviewer asks Sheila during the film’s open-
ing passage, which moves from a long view of
a fog-shrouded glade to a close-up of analog
equipment in a recording booth. “I don’t
know what I am,” is her uncertain reply—a
line that reads as over-emphatic in isolation,
but in context resonates with genuine grace, a
dynamic that’s fairly indicative of how much
of the film will operate. Even as Light From
Light sets up a dichotomy between faith and
skepticism, its trajectory remains funda-
mentally uncertain, as if wavering between
illumination and shadow. Harrill suggests
as much with a striking shot of Sheila’s pro-
file against a diffuse curtain of light, her neck
bowed as if in gentle supplication, her silhou-
ette seeming like a void yearning to be filled.
A programmer at Knoxville’s Public
Cinema (which he co-founded with Darren
Hughes) and the Associate Chair of the
University of Tennessee’s Cinema Studies
program, Harrill is a director clearly con-
versant with film history, so it’s no accident
that Light From Light can be productively
characterized by what it is not. Although
its focal point is Richard’s possibly haunted
house, the film refuses to indulge in its nar-
rative’s spook-show implications, however
much Sheila’s ghost whisperings (“Is anyone
here? If you’d like to communicate, let your-
self be known”) might bring to mind Kristen
Stewart in Olivier Assayas’ Personal Shopper
(2016). Even limiting the comparisons to
American genre fare, Light From Light has
no metaphysical leaps to match those of, say,
David Lowery’s A Ghost Story (2017), whose
Wisconsin-born director is credited here as
an executive producer.
While one could contend that Harrill is
thus attempting to “frustrate” those view-
ers who might expect Paranormal Activity-
esque horror, Light From Light unfolds in
a manner that’s all but indifferent to genre.
Rather, Harrill evinces a modest but distinct
attention to the solidities of lived experience:
Sheila’s day job at an airport car-rental ser-
vice, through which she is able to provide
for her high school-aged son Owen (Josh
Wiggins); a class on paranormal phenomena
that she helps teach so that she can borrow
the equipment needed for her investigation;
and the crisis that occurs when, while help-
ing Sheila set up at Richard’s house, Owen’s
friend Lucy (Atheena Frizzell) gets stung
by a wasp and goes into anaphylactic shock.
While Harrill may not use actors (and their
bodies) in the manner of, say, Bruno Dumont,
he is similarly interested in the ways that the
physical necessarily serves as a conduit for
the spiritual: the director shows his work in
an early scene where Lucy, practicing for a
class presentation, describes a Japanese tea
ceremony that involves a half-sized door de-
signed to make entrants kneel, and thus in-
spire humility. It’s through such evocations
that Harrill conveys the longing and incom-
pleteness that Sheila feels so acutely, which
are, for her, inseparable from (and in some
cases beholden to) the physical details of the
material world.
“Every day is a choice,” an abbot tells
Margaret (Ashley Shelton), the protago-
nist of Something, Anything, who arrives at
a monastery only to find that the friend that
she was looking for had left months earlier.
In Margaret’s realization that one could sim-
ply stop believing is an all-too-recognizable
incredulity—for after all, do not the beliefs
of others always seem so much more settled,
more certain than our own? Along similar
lines, although Richard says to Sheila that all
he ever wanted was a “pretty good explana-
tion,” it is by design that all the answers that
emerge in Light From Light are largely unsat-
isfying. A traipse up to Great Smoky Mountain
National Park to find the wreckage in which
Richard’s wife was found is framed as a kind of
pilgrimage, but it offers no Road-to-Damascus
moment, only a tenor of sombre regret.
Light From Light culminates with a pos-
sible miracle. After concluding her inves-
tigation of Richard’s house, Sheila makes
one final pass to ensure that she hasn’t left
any equipment behind. Whether by wind or
watchful spirit, the pages of a book left on
a nearby shelf flutter and turn; Sheila ap-
proaches and reads aloud to Richard from
the open page, which turns out to be the 18th
chapter of Anna Karenina. What registers
in this scene are, foremost, its sensorial de-
tails: Sheila’s fervent elocutions of Tolstoy’s
text (“...I have waked up!”) and the signs of
a light breeze on that summer day. It is here
that Light From Light presents faith as an
accumulation of choices: to believe not only
that a spirit might communicate, but also
that it would do so through this particular
book, at this particular moment in time, to
a grief-stricken widower in East Tennessee.
The position might seem an untenable one,
but what would faith be if it weren’t also
assailed by ineluctable doubt? The particu-
lars of the scene soon fade into hazy memo-
ry, but what lingers is the feeling—the very
one reflected in Sheila’s tear-streaked face
as she observes the changing light, which
now seems much stranger, more mysterious
than before.
77
Midsommar
A r i A s t e r, U S /S w e d e n
In an interview with Film Comment’s Michael
BY ANGELO MUREDDA Koresky after the release of Hereditary
(2018), Ari Aster spoke of the logic behind his
taboo-busting 2011 thesis film The Strange
Thing About the Johnsons. Gesturing to his
desire to rock the apple cart at the American
Film Institute, a feeder school for serious
filmmakers, he claims he started from the
place of asking himself “What’s the worst
thing I can make at the AFI?” and landed on
a family drama about a father being sexually
assaulted by his malevolent son. It’s a solid
bad-boy origin story for a scrappy young tal-
ent, whose formalist chops across Hereditary
and his sophomore effort Midsommar seem
deliberately at odds with his histrionic, over-
ripe material, as if the latter needed enrich-
ing by the former. Midsommar’s protracted
runtime, Big-Issue signposting, and over-
78
the-top (if genuinely impressive) choreogra-
phy further suggest that Aster isn’t a refiner
of dicey genre texts that explore the dark cor-
ners of the human psyche, but a talented aes-
thete-troll who’s as capable as he is tasteless.
Like Hereditary, Midsommar begins with
a death in the family, though this time Aster
trades the cutesy, superimposed death notice
with which he kicked off his debut for an im-
peccably crafted, borderline masochistic se-
quence that strikes a sustained note of dread.
After pulling apart the ends of an illustrated
banner to reveal a snowy, real-world land-
scape behind it, Aster cross-cuts between a
young woman named Dani (Florence Pugh),
who is desperately trying to reach her sister
and parents after receiving a cryptic email
from the former; Dani’s long-term boyfriend
Christian (Jack Reynor), who passive-aggres-
sively dodges her calls and texts while trying
to enjoy a night at the pub with his friends;
and glacial camera glides and pans through
Dani’s home leading up to the grisly reveal
that her sister has staged an elaborate murder-
suicide tableaux, one worthy of Hereditary’s
diorama-making protagonist. Dani’s subse-
quent, inconsolable trauma (mostly represent-
ed by wailing) sets the stage for the film’s much-
ballyhooed daytime horror. Mid-mourning
and mid-breakup, Dani and Christian embark
on a group trip to Sweden with Christian’s an-
thropology grad-student friends, along with a
local, Pelle (Vilhelm Blomgren), to observe the
once-in-a-century cultural ritual that gives
the film its title: a sort of extreme Mayfair in-
volving the ingestion of a lot of psychoactive
drugs and the crowning of a new May queen
(guess who?).
Pelle’s warning that the tradition they’re
about to witness is a bit like theatre, and
might seem silly to the uninitiated, is the
first of a few unnecessary authorial tells: it
recalls nothing so much as William Hurt’s
belaboured delivery of “It is farce” in M.
Night Shyamalan’s The Village (2004), a film
that seems to be on Aster’s mood board. In
owning up to the artificiality of the film’s
design, Aster seems to be hinting that he’s
fully aware of the comic potential of his mix
of stately camera movements and messy im-
ages of bodies pushed to their essential meat-
iness—a ploy that could be read as a reaction
to the accusations that he was a humourless
scold in Hereditary, a film in which it some-
times seemed that Toni Collette was riding
her own camp wavelength entirely separate
from Aster’s fastidious style. Midsommar
isn’t exactly funny, and is especially clumsy
when it’s trying hardest to be, as in the dead-
weight comic flourishes provided by Will
Poulter’s boorish tagalong, whose compul-
sive vaping and standard-issue douchebag
comments about seducing a milkmaid help-
fully identify him as one of the early victims.
Yet Aster seems to be embracing, rather
than sidelining, the macabre shock value of
his best visual ideas this time out. He revels
in the incongruous cartoon splat of a body
tumbling off a cliff’s edge in an otherwise
sterile extreme wide shot, or the sudden
hollowing-out of a face bashed in by a mallet
like a smashed pumpkin—both of which are
inherently more impactful in broad daylight,
where bodies presumably aren’t supposed
to turn to mush. Aster isn’t the first direc-
tor to employ horror to indulge in such ta-
boo pleasures, but he continues to be on the
wavelength of scolds who seem shy about
their genre of choice, hitching it to loftier
aims. It’s probably not fair to blame Aster
for becoming the poster child of “elevated
horror,” a brand description masquerading
as film criticism. It is worth asking, though,
whether his burgeoning reputation as a tech-
nician-slash-ideas guy is based on anything
other than his tonal weightiness, or wheth-
er—like Christopher Nolan, another doltish
image-maker who dreams big—he is part of
a new, genre-movie strand of what Andrew
Sarris once called “strained seriousness”: in
this instance, starting from the hefty run-
ning time and elaborate set design and cin-
ematography, and working backward from
there to find something to say with it all.
A number of Midsommar’s passionate de-
fenders have suggested that the film is strong-
est as a breakup movie, or a trauma movie, or
a depression movie, but Aster dabbles in such
subgenres for their flavour notes more than
anything else. As impressive as Pugh’s com-
mitment to howling her way through the first
act and frowning her way through the third
(in increasingly ornate head pieces) may be,
Dani’s family trauma doesn’t imprint on her
characterization any more vividly than a su-
perhero origin story from any given Marvel
movie, and the slow deterioration of her and
Christian’s relationship feels perfunctorily
drawn at best, a Punch and Judy show be-
tween primitive man and put-upon woman.
If Hereditary got some positive notes for its
apparent audacity at being “about” depres-
sion and the way it courses through family
trees, Midsommar suggests that Aster is only
really interested in mental illness and disa-
bility insofar as they work as narrative and
thematic shortcuts, hot-button issues stand-
ing in for more robust characterizations.
That Midsommar is largely effective de-
spite the thin ideas—about couples, disabil-
ity, and mental illness, arguably; about an-
thropology and academia, definitely—that
ostensibly elevate its horror is a testament
to Aster’s innate showmanship and his com-
mand of mood, especially when he embraces
the spectacle of the pagan cult theatrics. It’s
also thanks to Pugh’s game-faced willing-
ness to let herself be wielded as part of the
greenery in the finale, as her character’s
agency and subjectivity are emptied out by
the inexorable mechanics of the ritual, the
dulling effect of the drugs she’s been drip-fed
for the past hour, and, finally, by Aster’s film-
making, which increasingly resembles the
work of a circus ringmaster. Aster comes by
this anxiety-inducing finale honestly enough
that you wonder what he might be capable of
if he dropped all the trappings of prestige.
79
Exploded View | By Chuck Stephens
Peter Fonda’s
Idaho Transfer
“A useless piece of drivel about
an obnoxious group of teens
who get ‘teleported’ into the
future, where they are expected
to set up a new civilization in
Idaho.”
—Motion Picture Guide, author
and edition unknown, found on
the apparently abandoned Idaho
Film Commission website
The late Peter Fonda—actor, celebrity, ex-
perimental filmmaker, activist, head—never
actually did enjoy an easy ride, career-wise.
Onscreen and behind the camera, he had
brilliant flashes and boyish enthusiasms,
often in the same sweet breath. His work
was uneven, sometimes even unseemly, but
always, always beautiful in prismatic and
evanescent ways, part and parcel of the pa-
cific dreams and bitter disappointments
of his day. The above-quoted drivel, from
a critic I’ve left un-Googled, typifies much
of the appreciation that Fonda (1940-2019)
was awarded as a filmmaker in his time.
Of course, Fonda’s drifty, poetic directori-
al debut The Hired Hand (1971), a Western
co-starring his close friend Warren Oates,
has seen its reputation resurrected, as re-
flected by Arrow’s recent extras-laden Blu-
ray. But leaving aside for the moment any
further discussion of his third and final fea-
ture as director Wanda Nevada (1979), a re-
turn to the oater starring 13-year-old Brooke
Shields in her Pretty Baby (1978) follow-up, a
single question remains: Wherefore art thou,
Idaho Transfer (1973)?
A no-budget, deeply-stoned dystopian
cousin to flower-power future shocks like
John Carpenter’s Dark Star (1974) and Jim
McBride’s Glen and Randa (1971), Idaho
Transfer is a troubling puzzle of hippie bewil-
derment, written by little-known Thomas
Matthiesen in the zonked and indetermi-
nate Richard Brautigan/Rudy Wurlitzer
prose stylings of the day. On the surface, it’s
mainly about time travel beyond a moment of
imminent environmental collapse, and how
fucked-up time travel usually turns out to be,
and as such is a granddaddy to Primer (2014).
It’s also, thematically if not stylistically, of
a piece with Richard Fleischer’s eco-awful-
ness sci-fi masterwork Soylent Green (1973),
which was in theatres the same year. Never
mind where all the flowers have gone; guess
who’s going to be dinner was more the ques-
tion of the day.
But for all the film’s starved-earth hand-
wringing and gorgeously desolate lava-bed
landscapes, and avoiding altogether its
quasi-Twilight Zone final narrative stinger,
the reality is that Idaho Transfer is a mov-
ie mainly all about how incredibly lithe and
lovely its stars Kelley Bohanon and Caroline
Hildebrand are when they pull off their spe-
cially designed future-jeans and straddle a
hi-tech weightlifting bench, something that
travel via the trans-Idaho express apparent-
ly demands. Like Ripley in her Alien (1979)
panties, Bohanon’s emotionally fragile Karen
and Hildebrand’s biker chick-tough Isa bound
blessedly dishabille across the time/space
barrier. Space exploration or spicy exploita-
tion: does anyone really care? In the words
of Neil Young, “She said, ‘You’re strange, but
don’t change,’ and I let her.”
You can go and watch Idaho Transfer on
the YouTube right now. The film’s copyright
lapsed into public domain decades ago, and
restoration is unlikely—who even knows
where the elements are? It’s a film that, per-
haps fittingly, appears destined to be lost
to an obliterated time. Fonda was 32 when
he made it. He still had plenty of Easy Rider
(1969) money, but The Hired Hand hadn’t
fared well on release, critically or commer-
cially, and Fonda and his producing part-
ner William Hayward wanted a project they
could mount on the cheap: Idaho Transfer,
cast with unknowns and never-would-be’s
alongside sole semi-star Keith Carradine,
cost $150,000 by Fonda’s recollection. It
didn’t recoup its budget. It was shot by Bruce
Logan, who’d done visual effects on 2001: A
Space Odyssey (1968), some mid-’70s films
for Roger Corman, and is still working today.
Charles McLelland edited it, in between gigs
on Jack Hill’s Coffy (1973) and Foxy Brown
(1974). When I see Idaho Transfer today, and
I’ve seen it a dozen times or more, I see echoes
of the films of Will Hindle, particularly Saint
Flournoy Lobos-Logos and the Eastern Europe
Fetus Taxing Japan Brides in West Coast
Places Sucking Alabama Air (1970): gorgeous-
ly photographed, mostly unknowable, filled
with ominous longhairs stumbling across a
blasted landscape. A knife comes out, shit
goes down. Rest in peace, Heavenly Blues.
Idaho is a state of mind.
VIENNA INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL

OCTOBER 24—NOVEMBER 6, 2019

VIIENNALE.AT
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