DISPLAY UNTIL

JULY 31, 2023

MATT JOHNSON CHRISTIAN PETZOLD
BAS DEVOS DEBORAH STRATMAN
CAN/US $8.95

JOÃO CANIJO ANGELA SCHANELEC

1
PM #0040048647
 “FUNNY, FAST AND NERVE-RATTLING... INTENSELY
ENTERTAINING. A NEW CANADIAN CLASSIC.”
– THE GLOBE AND MAIL

“A BREATHLESS TECH FEVER DREAM.”

– SCREEN DAILY

“TRIUMPHANT... WONDERFULLY FUNNY.”

– DEADLINE

“MAKES GEEK HISTORY MORE ENTERTAINING

THAN IT HAS ANY RIGHT TO BE.”
– VARIETY

IN THEATRES MAY 12
2
1
Fata Morgana
 O

INTERVIEWS FEATURES

6 THE BATTLE OF WATERLOO 12 IMITATIONS OF LIFE

Matt Johnson and Matt Miller The Melodramas of João Canijo
on BlackBerry COLUMNS By Daniel Ribas
By Adam Nayman
5 EDITOR’S NOTE 22 AFTER TRAGEDY
16 SENTIMENTAL EDUCATION On Angela Schanelec’s Music
Christian Petzold on Afire 50 FESTIVALS By Phil Coldiron
By Darren Hughes Berlin: Samsara
By Lawrence Garcia 26 AETHER/ORE
30 THE NAMELESS WORLD Post-Humanism in Deborah
Bas Devos on Here 52 FESTIVALS Stratman’s Last Things
By Jordan Cronk Berlin: Notre corps By Michael Sicinski
By Beatrice Loayza
35 THE ECSTASY AND THE AGONY
CURRENCY
54 FESTIVALS Werner Herzog Plays Himself
Sundance By Christoph Huber
70 UN BEAU MATIN By Robert Koehler
By Hannah Seidlitz 41 IN SEARCH OF THE
57 BOOKS MIRACULOUS
72 INFINITY POOL Ian Penman’s Fassbinder: Notes on Some Recent
By Saffron Maeve Thousands of Mirrors Music Documentaries
By Erika Balsom By Max Goldberg
74 KNOCK AT THE CABIN
By Brendan Boyle 61 GLOBAL DISCOVERIES ON DVD 47 ON DANGEROUS GROUND
By Jonathan Rosenbaum No Master Territories
76 RICEBOY SLEEPS By Madeleine Wall
By Winnie Wang 65 CANADIANA
Black Zero
78 TORI ET LOKITA By Joshua Minsoo Kim
By Christopher Small
68 DEATHS OF CINEMA
Albert Pyun
By Will Sloan

EDITOR AND PUBLISHER
Mark Peranson
ART DIRECTION AND DESIGN
Vanesa Mazza
ASSISTANT EDITOR
Peter Mersereau
CONTRIBUTING EDITORS
Tom Charity, Christoph Huber,
Dennis Lim, Adam Nayman
ADVISORY BOARD
Samantha Chater, Jesse Cumming,
Alicia Fletcher, Will Sloan,
Blake Williams
PRODUCTION AND
MARKETING MANAGER
Kayleigh Rosien
WEB DESIGN
Adrian Kinloch
Cinema Scope ( ISSN 1488-7002 ) ( HST
866048978rt0001 ) is published quarterly by
Cinema Scope Publishing. Issue 94. Vol. 25, No. 2.
parts of this publication may be reproduced in any
form without permission. All articles remain prop-
erty of their authors. Submissions are eagerly
encouraged. Distributed in Canada through
Disticor Direct, Magazines Canada, in the US
through Disticor, and worldwide through Annas
International. Cinema Scope is found online at
www.cinema-scope.com. For advertising informa-
tion, call Kayleigh Rosien at ( 416 ) 889-5430 or
email info@cinema-scope.com. Subscriptions are
available for $25/4 issues, personal, and $50/4
issues, institutional ( plus HST ). American sub-
scribers please pay in American funds. Overseas
subscriptions are available at $50 US / 4 issues.
Subscriptions by credit card are also available
online at www.cinema-scope.com. For back issues,
subscriptions, or letters to the editor, email info@
cinema-scope.com or write Cinema Scope
Publishing, 465 Lytton Blvd, Toronto, ON, M5N 1S5
Canada. Printed by acorn | print production,
Toronto, ON.
publications mail agreement no. 40048647.
Return undeliverable Canadian addresses to:
cinema scope publishing, 465 lytton blvd.,
toronto, on, m5n 1s5
Print Management
acorn | print production
Editor’s Note
THE CINEMA SCOPE TOP 10 OF 2022
1. Pacifiction (Albert Serra)
2. De Humani Corporis Fabrica (Véréna Paravel, Lucien Castaing-Taylor)
3. Crimes of the Future (David Cronenberg)
4. Unrest (Cyril Schäublin)
5. The Novelist’s Film (Hong Sangsoo)
6. Saint Omer (Alice Diop)
7. Showing Up (Kelly Reichardt)
8. EO (Jerzy Skolimowski)
9. Queens of the Qing Dynasty (Ashley McKenzie)
10. The Plains (David Easteal)
Special mentions: Aftersun (Charlotte Wells), All the Beauty and the Bloodshed (Laura Poitras),
Mutzenbacher (Ruth Beckermann), Tár (Todd Field), Walk Up (Hong Sangsoo)
To begin with, an update on the current situation of things, which hasn’t changed substantial-
ly since the last editor’s note. But as I write this in between minor mental breakdowns, you’ve
caught me in a calmer state of mind, which should not be mistaken for a lack of desperation. Quite
frankly, as at the time of writing this issue is nowhere near complete, I don’t know why this is.
Maybe I gave it my all the last time around. Perhaps it’s looking at the eclectic list of the films
above, which reminds me that in 2023 we are at a point where cinema is truly all over the place,
that gives me some hope—that memorable films can come from infinite places outside of a green-
screen Hollywood studio lot, be it Cape Breton, the Swiss Jura mountains, Bora Bora, the inside
of an car on an Australian highway, the inside of the body, or the inside of the body in the future.
And the films featured in this issue—even if a fair number of them hail from less exotic locales, like
Germany, Belgium, Portugal, and Waterloo, Ontario—are just as inspiring.
But action needs to be taken to keep this magazine going, at least in the interim. The first step
involves raising both the cover price and the subscription price, which is something that, quite
frankly, we should have done more than a decade ago. Even if the new and improved price still
strikes me as an unparalleled deal in this industry, based on the material that we provide and what
it costs to produce, print, and distribute it, I’m sorry if this strikes some long-term subscribers as
a deal-breaker. I also hope this does not discourage new cinephiles from coming on board, be-
cause, once again, we are not just doing this for ourselves—so, if you do subscribe, please continue
with spreading the word, gifting subscriptions, or purchasing back issues.
After last issue’s editorial truth bomb hit the web, I was truly gratified to see a strong uptake in
new subscribers—which is certainly one of the reasons why you’re seeing this issue published—
but we are still nowhere near the break-even point. I am doing my best to avoid asking our readers
to give more to support the magazine in terms of something like crowd-funding, though, barring
some kind of deus ex machina, I think this is an inevitability if we want to reach a financial state
that is manageable. We will continue to try and attract more corporate interest in terms of adver-
tising—no millionaire donors have come a-knocking, unfortunately, but that door, as always, re-
mains open. I would like to leave you, though, with the honest realization that this hobby is in no
way open-ended for me, especially as the hobby long ago reached the point of being labour—and
I’m not interested in exploiting anyone’s labour.
—Mark Peranson
PHOTO CREDITS: Apple TV+: 45; Berlinale: 26, 29, 50, 53; Black Zero: 65, 67; Cinema Guild: 22, 24, 25; Criterion: 57; Disney+:
41; Elevation Pictures: 6, 9, 10, 42, 73; Filmswelike: 16, 18, 21; Game Theory: 76, 77; Janus/Sideshow: 79; Mongrel Media: 71;
Portugal Film: 12, 14, 15; Rediance: 30, 32; Studio Canal: 58; Sundance: 54, 55, 56; TIFF Cinematheque: 47, 49; Universal: 75;
Vinegar Syndrome/MGM: 68; Werner Herzog Film/Deutsche Kinemathek: 2, 35, 37, 39; Zapruder Films: Cover
The Battle of Waterloo
Matt Johnson and Matt Miller on BlackBerry
BY ADAM NAYMAN

A semi-scenic, mostly horizontal non-metropolis located about

100 kilometres west-southwest of Toronto, the city of Waterloo
(pop. 121,000) has earned a reputation as the Silicon Valley of the
North—a close-knit network of tech companies and think tanks
encircled by university campuses and a disproportionate number
of insurance firms. The latter pile-up is a peculiarity that has led
to the city also being dubbed (a bit less sexily) “The Hartford of
Canada,” a reference that might have made Matt Johnson’s mid-
’90s civic time capsule/corporate origin myth BlackBerry even
funnier than it already is. It’s hard, though, to imagine anybody
(including the lyricists of ABBA) improving on the script’s best
line, which gets shouted proudly by local antihero Jim Balsillie
(Glenn Howerton) at a moment of truth in the NHL head offices:
“I’m from Waterloo, where the vampires hang out!”
With his gleaming bald pate and dead-eyed stare, Howerton’s
incarnation of the infamous Ontario businessman Balsillie—who
became a household name around here through his very public
and ultimately failed attempts to shanghai a hockey franchise to
the steel town of Hamilton—does indeed look a bit like a board-
room Nosferatu. Elsewhere, this sleek, toothy predator is referred
to as a “shark,” which makes him all the better equipped to maul
the “pirates” poised to shake down the shallow end of the late-
’90s internet start-up pool. Balsillie doesn’t like the geeky non-

6
entities pitching him on a combination cell phone/handheld com-
puter, but he hates the idea that somebody else might get rich off
their scheme.
Howerton’s 40-proof, rageaholic performance skirts carica-
ture but comes out the other end as a psychologically deft tour de
force. This loosely fictionalized version of Balsillie, whose seeth-
ing, pent-up contempt for partners and competitors alike ema-
nates from some darker place (maybe even subconscious solidari-
ty with his geeky new underlings) is a memorable and malevolent
creation—the closest thing Canadian entertainment has had to a
Gordon Gekko since the glory days of Traders. Inevitably, Michael
Douglas’ Reaganite bloodsucker gets invoked in BlackBerry by a
character played ( just as inevitably, and beneath a Karate Kid–ish
headband) by co-writer/director Johnson, who slyly exploits the
current non-visibility of BlackBerry Limited co-founder Douglas
Fregin to insert a barely veiled version of him at the company’s
primal scene. Johnson’s Doug is a pop-cultural sponge whose
vision for BlackBerry mostly involves eating pizza and watching
Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981) or They Live (1988) with the boys;
suffice it to say that Balsillie, who is, existentially speaking, all out
of bubblegum, is not amused.
Rather than presenting a tonal problem, the wild contrast in
acting styles between the technically adroit It’s Always Sunny in
Philadelphia veteran Howerton and Johnson—who’s been riffing
on this same hipster-doofus persona for almost 20 years, since
his YouTube start-up Nirvanna the Band the Show—is evocative of
the deeper, generational tensions of the story being told, as is the
fact that Doug’s colleagues are played by various semi-luminaries
of the Toronto film scene. In its tale of self-styled keyboard war-
riors crashing the gates of industry—a narrative freely adapted
by Johnson and producer Matt Miller from Jacquie McNish and
Sean Silcoff’s 2015 bestseller Losing the Signal—BlackBerry una-
voidably echoes The Social Network (2010), still the gold standard
for millennial docudrama, in spite of its ultimately shortsighted
Sorkinisms about the Real Meaning of Facebook.
David Fincher has said that his goal in dramatizing the rise of
Mark Zuckerberg was to make “the Citizen Kane of John Hughes
movies”; a better way to describe the final product might be as a
spiritual remake of Revenge of the Nerds (1987), with beta-male
shut-ins remaking the global village in their image. BlackBerry
takes certain of its cues from Fincher, and amusingly bypasses
Sorkin’s misogyny by having no female characters of note what-
soever. But BlackBerry is closer in spirit to something like the
Coens’ Inside Llewyn Davis (2013), a tragicomic picaresque about
the guys who ended up being nothing more than the opening act
for the iPhone. Much of the film’s two-hour runtime (which will
see it divided into three parts after theatrical release for an even-
tual airing as a CBC miniseries) is taken up by the culture war
waged inside the dingy, mall-front offices of Research in Motion,
where Doug senses his powers waning as consigliere to his old
pal, electronics wiz Mike Lazaridis (Jay Baruchel), in the wake of
Balsillie’s one-man hostile takeover. Doug’s desire to keep things
“real”—i.e., keep playing in a perpetually cash-strapped Never
Never Land with the other lost bros—is, finally, just as solipsis-
tic and selfish a methodology as Balsillie’s bombastic tantrums.
Baruchel’s performance is a little too mannered (and his faux-grey
hairdo a little too sketch-comedy false) to fully sell his character’s
pains at ending up wedged between a rock and a hard place, but
Mike’s basic dilemma is still absorbing: what if it’s not failure that
he’s really afraid of, but success?
This is a question that resonates in the larger context of
Canadian cinema, where success is always relative and the ten-
dency to grade filmmaking on a curve is real. In a glowing Globe
and Mail profile published after BlackBerry’s Berlin premiere,
producer Niv Fichman—a longtime Canadian film-industry power
player who’s worked with every high-end filmmaker in the coun-
try, from François Girard to Paul Gross —praised Johnson for be-
ing “anti-establishment.” Leaving aside the fact that Johnson has
made a congenital habit of publicly mocking Fichman’s friends
and peers (to the point of calling for their heads, circa the imbro-
glio over Johnson’s school-shooter mockumentary The Dirties
[2012]), “anti-establishment” is an interesting way to describe a
filmmaker whose eyes have been on the brass ring (such as it is)
for a while now.
Hitting the big time has been Johnson’s theme ever since he
and his onscreen straight man Jay McCarroll schemed about
playing the Rivoli on Nirvanna the Band the Show. In Operation
Avalanche (2015)—a period thriller famously shot on the sly at
NASA’s headquarters—the director filmed himself, in charac-
ter as an overbearing auteur named “Matt Johnson,” literally
shaking hands with Stanley Kubrick (beating Steven Spielberg’s
Fordian Fabelmans gag to the punch). Not even Xavier Dolan can
match his Anglo-Canadian counterpart when it comes to self-
mythologizing—although he does, to this point, have him beaten
in terms of box-office receipts. Among other things, BlackBerry
represents a literal and figurative investment in the future-
present of Canadian cinema by an establishment that’s surely
more interested in a definitively figurative return. But now that
he’s arrived at the point of commanding an eight-figure budget,
Johnson, Miller et al seem interestingly torn between their roots
and their ambitions, and more specifically between realizing the
latter on their own (Canadian) terms.
The money is very much onscreen in BlackBerry, but mostly
in the service of the same scrappy tactility that is Johnson’s stock
in trade. One case in point would be the agile, alert cinematogra-
phy by Jared Rabb, which keeps subtly shifting distance and focal
length to probe through strata of analog clutter—the right look for
a narrative about the fateful intersection of physical and digital
engineering. The cutting, by Curt Lobb, is swift and propulsive
while imbuing a modest but real sense of sweep; the soundtrack
is loaded with expensive Big Shiny Tunes that pull double duty
as period signifiers and subtext generators. There’s plenty of
Canadiana, too: the Matthew Good Band’s combustible “Hello,
Timebomb,” about the Devil hanging out at Radio Shack, could
have been written about Balsillie himself.
In a scene destined for YouTube supercuts, Howerton demol-
ishes a payphone, Barry Egan–style, while howling at his subor-
dinates that the three reasons BlackBerrys get sold is because
“they…fucking…work.” Leaving aside the cleverness of the con-
joined conceptual-slash-slapstick sight gag—telecom is dead,
7
long live telecom—the larger idea is suggestive of the collateral
damage that goes into any act of creation: the proverbial omelette
and the proverbial eggs. It’d be a stretch to say that Johnson’s par-
able about the fragile relationship between risk and innovation
works on an emotional level (there’s nothing in the film to rival
Jesse Eisenberg’s lonely master-of-the-universe arc in The Social
Network clicking unrequitedly into the void), but it’s hardly a glib
or cynical movie, nor is it an impersonal one. In showing how
hard, fun, and downright unlikely it is to make something capable
of penetrating a crowded and indifferent marketplace, Johnson
is allegorizing his own semi-popular filmmaking practice at least
as smartly as in his more explicitly self-reflexive mock-docs. This
is the first of his proudly callow movies to grapple with themes
of maturity, nostalgia, and perspective—the logical next step for
an enfant terrible hypothetically within spitting distance of a
mid-life crisis.
BlackBerry ends with an image that brings these anxieties into
focus while still allowing for some ambivalence. It’s a goofy movie
that’s smart enough to know that innocence and experience are
not pure states, any more than are failure or success; at its core,
it’s a film about contingency, and, as such, it’s a clear-eyed piece
of work. The irony in BlackBerry is that even after finding a way
to literally put the world in the palm of their (and our) hands,
the RIM guys lost their grip—the brass ring isn’t just shiny, but
slippery. In a country whose filmic output is defined by different
shades of self-deprecation, it’s refreshing to see a filmmaker who’s
thinking about reach and grasp.
Cinema Scope: My first question is how much deep, rigorous
research did Matt (Johnson) do to play Douglas Fregin?
Matt Johnson: We adopted the philosophy of, show up day one,
no rehearsal, and play it as it lays.
Scope: The fact that you have a character who was at the centre
of BlackBerry but isn’t public-facing in retirement was a big help
to the movie, as it lets you stage one sort of film inside of another.
Johnson: It helped a lot. It was a strange conundrum with this
picture. We’re making a broad historical comedy in our own style,
and trying to make it personal and fit with the canon of our previ-
ous work, and it was really only in the margins of the book where
the character of Doug was being alluded to. But it was enough that
Matt Miller and I were like, well, this guy Fregin was the social
connector of Research in Motion; it seems like he had very little to
do with the technology side of the product. But he’s a founder, and
he stays with the company until 2007. It spoke to the idea of this
nostalgic sort of guy who’s there from the beginning—a throwback
type that I really understood.
As soon as we saw that as the place for “Matt Johnson” to exist
in the film, the rest became clear. I’m sure it’s not lost on you that
in some ways, the characters in this movie aren’t really building
a smartphone: they’re independent filmmakers who have success
when they’re young, and it changes everything. The alienation
that ends up affecting the team is very much like what was hap-
pening in our own lives.
Matt Miller: I think Matt hit the nail on the head. When we
were first brought this project by Niv Fichman, it was just sup-
8
posed to be a writing job. We read the book, and right as we were
breaking it down to adapt it, we realized we also had to make it.
So that let us write it a bit differently. We didn’t always know that
Johnson was going to be in the movie, but we did start to get excit-
ed at the idea of this Trojan Horse thing. That’s also why we cast
the engineers in the film the way we did, with all these people from
the Toronto film scene—the dynamic felt really resonant, with
Doug as this ringleader figure, at the heart of it all. Compared to
some of our other films, Matt’s at the margins of this movie, but
he’s still there and it felt familiar for us.
Scope: What Johnson said about allegorizing your own expe-
rience is interesting, because it’s the same thing David Fincher
mentioned about The Social Network: that he saw the start-up ele-
ments of Facebook as being really similar to his experiences in the
’80s with Propaganda Films.
Johnson: I think one of the keys to a movie like The Social
Network is that it doesn’t feel impersonal or judgmental. Fincher’s
treatment of Zuckerberg was one of the main things we took from
that movie: not just making an anti-capitalist screed about how
stupid and misguided BlackBerry’s founders were, which is the
easy thing to do. I think we give the characters their due, includ-
ing Mike Lazaridis, who gets to return in the end to this innocent
childhood tinkering, which is beautiful in a way. I watch the final
frames of the film and I feel like he looks happy, just fixing things.
What I mean is, we weren’t interested in just making fun of the
characters, or having it be a cautionary tale about not ending up
like them, because we love them. We love all of those guys.
Scope: The idea of “anti-capitalist screed” is interesting, in
the context of this being a relatively big-budget Canadian movie.
Beyond the fact that you’re now working closely with the kinds of
producers and funding bodies you used to take shots at, there’s a
tension between the smash-and-grab filmmaking you guys made
your names with and the expectations that come with more re-
sources. What does it mean to be working with what is basically a
blank cheque, at least in Canadian dollars?
Johnson: It’s blank-ish. There are maybe three or four decimal
places that are blank, and the rest is pretty clearly inked. But yeah,
you’re describing the central tension of the production, and to put
it in plain language, the more money we get to work with, the few-
er tools we have. You wouldn’t assume that, but it’s true. I mean,
even just dealing with actors unions—we thought it would be mag-
ical to get all these Toronto filmmakers to play the engineers, but
it was like pulling teeth. On one of our older movies it would have
been a no-brainer, but it was like pulling teeth for Miller.
The transition you’re talking about—about working with
Telefilm Canada and the larger system—has pivoted a lot of the
frustration and realigned my vision for the future of Canadian
cinema. I think that some of the people who’ve come before have
been content to (to use a line from the film) do “good-enough”
filmmaking, and never really challenge the status quo. So there’s
this carcass of dinosaur bones that we’re trying to make movies
underneath, and it’s hard to manoeuvre from there.
I’ll say that there were other movies shooting around the
same time as ours, with some of the same crew, and I spoke with
the filmmakers and they were having hellish experiences—they
couldn’t get anything done. I asked if they argued and just said
they wouldn’t do it that way, and they said no, their producers told
them it’s always been this way and it’s not going to change. I said,
that’s your first mistake. The thing I kept saying while making this
movie was, “I’m not doing that,” and Miller will tell you there were
probably 300 times when we were told, “You can’t do it this way,
because it’s never been done this way.” My refusing to agree with
that is why the movie kept moving forward, and why it feels as free
as it does.
Miller: My job was really to insulate Johnson from as much of
that as humanly possible. The less he knew about what was go-
ing on, the better, because it would have made him really upset
and distracted him from the very big job he had on set. The only
reason the movie was successful, though, was that all of the de-
partment heads were longtime friends and collaborators. If you
had watched us shooting, it would have felt more or less like being
on set for Nirvanna the Band the Show or The Dirties: it was the
same people doing the same jobs. Maybe Jared Raab had a fancier
camera in his hand, or some better tools, but we fought to keep
our crew small. Every time you add somebody to production, it
complicates things—suddenly you need to feed them, and trans-
port them, and things get out of control. We did a lot of things to
stay true to our roots, and so there were times where we’d be a bit
more run and gun, or shoot in places where we didn’t really have
permission to be there.
Johnson: It’s no mistake that in the film, as RIM grows, they
lose what made the original company magic. That’s why the film
ends with that image of the guys in the ’90s. The whole reason the
product was what it was is because of the spiritual magic of the
original team, and, after that, things were just running on fumes.
It was all just the dissipation of that initial energy.
Scope: It’s interesting that that photo is at the end of the mov-
ie, because it feels like something has truly been lost at the end. I
wonder if that’s about you guys as filmmakers as well?
Johnson: None of us could explain why that photo was so pow-
erful; it was more trite, like, “look how far they’ve come.” It was
originally placed right after Michael Ironside’s character shows
up and there’s the White Stripes montage, but our editor, Curt
Lobb, said it belonged at the end of the movie. I can’t even explain
the feeling it gave me the first time I saw it. Like: did they win? Or
did they lose? Was this all worth it? Was this for the betterment of
society, or for themselves?
Scope: You mentioned the ’90s setting and nostalgia, and it
strikes me that, starting with the BlackBerry itself, this is a very
analog movie: very tactile, very physical, lots of literal assembly
and breaking apart. It was maybe the last moment where a tech
pitch had to even have a solid object in order to get over, right? Or
when Doug goes to Best Buy and the team is just lashing all these
bulbous, handheld gadgets together…
Johnson: We always try to play with the idea that the camera
itself is a tool that the audience feels and understands. This is a
huge topic and I could talk about it for hours, but it’s like when you
watch this movie, the camera is suddenly heavier at the beginning,
because it’s an older era. The further back we go in history, the
9
heavier it gets: on Operation Avalanche we were taking everything
from Haskell Wexler, from the lenses to the weight of the equip-
ment. Audiences subconsciously feel the weight of the camera and
the intelligence of the operator, and whatever era you’re in—VHS,
Betacam, DV, mini-DV—each has its own cinematic language. The
way the camera moves on the shoulder of the operator is, in a very
McLuhanish way, what you’re actually watching. Those are the
rules. Our movie begins in the VHS era, and we had to reverse-
engineer those sensations. Jared found these rubber-ball tripod
heads that you could use to mount the camera, and they’d move
like they were from 20 years ago. And then, as we went along, we
kept gradually deflating the heads and moving towards a more
stable mount.
Scope: The era-switching in BlackBerry is subtler than in, say,
Steve Jobs (2015).
Johnson: That movie tries to hold the hand of the audience in
a way that is weirdly anti-Jobsian. Jobs was a master of having
a technological experience be seamless, so that the user doesn’t
realize it. What got the audience here in Berlin was when Mike
opens up the BlackBerry Storm case, there’s a CD in there—you
need instructions to wield the thing. Whereas you open an iPhone
and it’s just the device, and it teaches you how to use it. The prod-
uct explains itself.
Miller: You brought up Steve Jobs—we watched that, and The
Social Network and Moneyball (2011). We always said, “Wouldn’t
it have been great to just have Steve Jobs be set inside the garage?”
That’s why we spent so much time in BlackBerry at what we called
“RIM1,” the office over the Shoppers Drug Mart. That’s the ’90s
we grew up in.
Scope: The Shoppers fulfills the Drake-ian prophecy of “started
from the bottom now we’re here.” I want to get to more CanCon
stuff in a minute, but let’s talk about Glenn Howerton, who’s play-
10
ing the first adult in any of your movies. I mean, the grown-ups
in your movies are like the parents in Peanuts, so this is a very
different dynamic. I felt like this version of Jim Balsilie hates the
geeky teenagers he’s gotten mixed up with, but that it’s also self-
loathing. He recognizes himself in them, and he hates that.
Johnson: There’s a reason he’s bald! He’s very carefully cast.
Miller and I talked about it and we thought that what would
make the movie really great would be having somebody on set
who we were all afraid of. Not the character—somebody who
we were really afraid of, who people will respect and defer to in
every instance, more than to me. Somebody I’ll have no power
over, because he’s had 15 seasons of the most successful comedy
series ever.
In truth, Glenn doesn’t find me funny. We’re friends and we
get along great, but he wasn’t intimidated by us or the work we’ve
done. And he had no interest in the things that the “Research in
Motion” side of the movie were about. None.
Miller: I can give you an amazing example. The first time Jim
arrives at RIM, we intentionally never introduced Glenn to the
engineers. We never showed him the set. So when he comes to the
door and sees Matt with the plunger in his hand…he’s a brilliant
actor, but it’s real. He’s seeing these things for the first time, and
it’s like day four of production and he’s thinking, “What the fuck
did I get myself into with these guys?”
Johnson: He said it to me! He said it to me openly! After those
first takes he pulled me aside—and, again, this guy doesn’t joke
around, ever—and he asked for a private conversation. And he
said, “You told me that the tone of this film was grounded.” It was
a threat: he was saying it right to me, you know? I had just met this
guy. Glenn was very open with me that he wanted to do something
where he would be taken seriously. I see the role as funny, and I
told him that he was going to be the funniest guy in the movie. He
said he wouldn’t play it funny and I said good, because that would
be even funnier.
Scope: I saw Jim as thinking he has to scare these guys, or else
they’ll just make fun of him. It’s like when a coach loses their
team: respect degrades into mockery.
Miller: you can see it in the scene where he goes in and tells the
guys, “You need to sell half a million BlackBerries right now,” and
in the shots of the sales team, they’re scared and they start laugh-
ing as a defense mechanism. That’s very real.
Scope: Balsillie is such an interesting figure: a Canadian mas-
ter capitalist, or maybe a Harper-era archetype. But to be so
pushy, and to throw your weight around like that, isn’t a very
Canadian quality.
Johnson: Every piece of behaviour I saw from Balsillie struck
me as he was trying to do his best impersonation of an American.
There’s a lot of Wall Street (1987) references in the movie, also
Glengarry Glen Ross (1992), and we saw it as writing a character
who thought this was how Americans actually are, all the time.
That helped us to understand him. It’s coming from this Canadian
inferiority complex: he’s not exactly poised to inherit the world.
He gets fired for wanting too much, in a way—for wanting what
he thinks is the right thing. All it does is spur him on to be more
American. The self-hatred comes from seeing other people like
the guy in his first office, Callahan, and thinking, “I hate that, I’m
not going to be that.” He sees Americans and he hates them, so he
decides he’s going to beat them. It infects everything.
Scope: It’s crucial that you don’t have any kind of primal scene
or origin myth; his hatred is credible and fully inhabited without
ever being explained.
Miller: We toyed with those ideas. We had a lot of different pos-
sible openings, like him getting kicked off his childhood hockey
team, or not getting picked to play at recess, or flashbacks to him
getting beaten up. Another thing we had for quite a while was Jim
trying to hide his Canadianisms, but we decided the audience was
going to get it already and we didn’t need to do that.
Scope: Have you guys heard from Jim Balsillie yet?
Johnson: My secret intuition was that he was going to love the
film. He was going to see it as, “Oh, they made me a movie star.”
The author of the book we based the script on, Sean Silcoff, speaks
to Balsillie regularly on the telephone, so he was kept up to date on
everything. We’ve heard he has an enthusiastic curiosity. I don’t
have a psychological take on the real guy; I only have what Miller
and I wrote based on transcripts of conversations, all secondhand.
What the real guy thinks, I have no clue.
Miller: Our plan is to reach out when we get back to Toronto
and arrange a screening. In many ways it’s a sympathetic portrait
that humanizes him a way our media hasn’t.
Scope: I promise you both that if you had $900 million you
would no longer be human to me.
Miller: I’d get us courtside seats for the Raptors.
Scope: I know the film is going to air on CBC and stream on
CBC Gem later this year as a miniseries. Was that a consideration
for the overall structure?
Johnson: Yes and no. We thought about dividing it into three
different eras, but we moved off of that as the film took shape. It’ll
be more like the final cut just split into three, but we have a lot of
unused stuff that will be in the miniseries.
Scope: You guys cast Canadian-born actors like Michael
Ironside and Saul Rubinek in key supporting roles, which again
seems tied to the overall project of the movie: this tension be-
tween Canada and the US, in this case between Canadian cinema
and Hollywood.
Johnson: I think it speaks to an era when there was an excite-
ment about actors coming up in this country—those guys embody
that, and they still have it. Now, in English Canada, it’s a bit like
there’s no actors. Where is the troupe?
Scope: Well, this is a big talking point: the idea that a lot of the
best movies being made in this country—whether you want to call
them microbudget, or independent, or hybrid, or whatever—don’t
use actors conventionally, and don’t use narrative conventionally
either. These are films whose styles are dependent on non-actors
or improvised dialogue, or something along those lines. It still
feels like a byproduct of certain things in Canadian film history:
the documentary tradition and the lack of a clear narrative mod-
el beyond Hollywood. So you’re in an interesting position, which
is somewhere between an emerging vanguard and a mainstream
that’s still a bit ill-defined.
Miller: I think that the criticism of our film will be from people
who don’t get it or connect with it and think it’s just another cook-
ie-cutter biopic of a tech start-up. Obviously, we don’t feel that
way. We took that model and fused it with our own sensibilities
and style and taste. The criticism could be that it’s a sell-out, that
it’s an American-style movie made in Canada. But it’s a Canadian
story, based on a Canadian book about Canadian subjects, made
with an almost entirely Canadian cast and crew and financed al-
most entirely in Canada. We shouldn’t feel bad about wanting
people to see our films, right?
Johnson: Hold on a second, Miller. You said before that a lot
of the cinema being made right now is in the necessity-is-the-
mother-of-invention mold. I think what we’re seeing now is peo-
ple making the sorts of movies that can be made right. There
aren’t a lot of actors, there aren’t a lot of writing programs…our
film schools are stuck in the ’80s. Miller and I are inside these in-
stitutions; we’re teaching at York University.
Scope: That thing about being inside of the institutions is
pretty ominous.
Johnson: The call is coming from inside the house! But there’s
a reason now that we have a search for narrative, actor-driven,
beat-to-beat storytelling. There’s no ground for those flowers to
grow. We’ve managed to culturally eradicate the fertile ground for
this kind of filmmaking.
Scope: I don’t know if you guys can really be a model for any-
body else. I do think there’s a history of Canadian filmmakers try-
ing and struggling to level up, for whatever reason. But eventually
one of these movies is going to break out, too.
Johnson: Time will bear it out. I mean, again, this film could re-
ally, really, really fail, especially with domestic audiences. There’s
the chance that our style is way too alienating, and an echoing
mass of fiftysomething Canadians will be like, “I can’t believe they
let these guys make the movie about BlackBerry.”
11
Bad Living

Imitations of Life
The Melodramas of João Canijo

BY DANIEL RIBAS
A culmination of João Canijo’s oeuvre, the diptych Bad Living/
Living Bad premiered at this year’s Berlinale—the former in the in-
ternational Competition, where it won the Silver Bear Jury Prize,
and the latter in the parallel Encounters competition. The films fo-
cus on a hotel from complementary angles: the story of the family
running the hotel (Bad Living), and those of the guests who tempo-
rarily occupy it (Living Bad). They are pieces of the same ambitious
endeavour: to portray motherly love, and how it becomes a suffocat-
ing affection. Made with his habitual entourage (Anabela Moreira,
Rita Blanco, Cleia Almeida, and Vera Barreto) and an enormous
ensemble of additional actors (Madalena Almeida, Nuno Lopes,
Filipa Areosa, Leonor Silveira, Rafael Morais, Lia Carvalho, Beatriz
Batarda, Carolina Amaral, and Leonor Vasconcelos), Canijo’s latest
project is an impressive demonstration of the director’s process of
cinematic creation.
To map João Canijo’s cinema is also to map Portugal’s cultural
representations. His cinematic geography is the country’s peripher-
ies, and his work may be understood as a sociological study of life in
these places. Charting his almost four decades of filmmaking is also
to understand the changes in the “Portuguese world,” which rapidly

12
transformed from a rigid dictatorship to a free-market democracy.
Whether in a small industrial city in the south or a rural village in
the north, in a Parisian banlieue or a hostess bar in the middle of no-
where, in social housing on the outskirts of Lisbon or in Fátima, the
Portuguese sanctuary of the Christian faith, Canijo’s films are set in
spaces that insinuate the terrible circumstances that surround us. In
the centres of these peripheries, Canijo sees the structure of a com-
munity built around family as a working tool of patriarchal power
and control, reliant on the use of violence to endure.
The roots of Canijo’s cinema are directly linked to a story of vio-
lence—of a country that endured, for almost five decades, one of the
longest dictatorships in Europe. At the core of this fascist regime was
an ideology of the family as the essential core of all social behaviours.
By maintaining the family as a representation of power, the dicta-
torship was preserved by the smallest cells of social reproduction. A
cultural and social discourse of familial roles allowed for a society
maintained by the power of the father as the working man; the place
of the mother as caretaker of domestic duties and the children’s
education; and a perfect mirroring by the youngsters, separated
by gender, of their parents’ roles. The state joined with the church
to ensure this order of life went on. The dreamy representation of
family—the dream of Portuguese people’s “good manners”—enabled
an enduring power. As sociologists and cultural critics have demon-
strated, this representation was supported by practices of violence
within families. These practices were preventive tactics of patriar-
chal power, but mostly physical and psychological violence perpe-
trated by men on women and children. Many of the practices were
allowed and approved by social and judicial institutions.
Moreover, Portugal was an underdeveloped country with low
levels of literacy, and organized mainly in small communities in
rural areas. Cities were a place of danger, and the representation of
the “good life” was made by reproducing the “simplicities” of rural
life. This representation created an illusion of peaceful social inter-
actions, where everybody had a parental kinship and communities
were large families—as, indeed, they were. However, those practices
of power also emulated the practices within families. After the dem-
ocratic revolution in April 1974, the regime was radically changed,
but while the conditions of life were transformed over time—par-
ticularly following Portugal’s entry into the EU in 1986—the coun-
try’s social landscape stayed much the same.
João Canijo started making films in the mid-’80s, part of a new
generation of filmmakers (including Pedro Costa, Joaquim Pinto,
João Botelho, Vítor Gonçalves, and Teresa Villaverde) preoccu-
pied with disturbed families failed by absent parents, populated by
fragile and orphan youth. Canijo’s first films, Three Less Me (1988)
and Lovely Child (1990), are stories of young adults trying to con-
nect with or overcome their families, and he truly established his
career in the early ’00s with films that proffered damning portraits
of Portuguese family life. Suggesting a hierarchical system wherein
families are places of violence and claustrophobia—what we may call
a “dramaturgy of violence”—these works revealed the inner contra-
dictions of the spaces of love.
At their core, the narratives of these films revolve around wom-
en trying to overcome—perhaps naïvely—their condition, and ulti-
mately failing badly. The social context already translates the impos-
sibility of change. That is precisely the point in choosing “home” as
the mise en scène of daily domestic life. This architectural space is
the ideal geography for speaking of the closure of family within itself,
creating the conditions for violence to arise. Consider the films’ set-
tings: Get a Life (2001) takes place in an apartment on the crowded
outskirts of Paris; In the Darkness of the Night (2004) in a hostess bar
that is a place of work and also the living area of a family; Misbegotten
(2007) in a village café in which the owners again both work and live;
Blood of My Blood (2011) almost entirely in the interior of a small
house in a suburban neighbourhood. These spaces move the char-
acters away from social conviviality; they indulge in themselves, re-
ducing life to strict orders of power, always involving a fight between
women and a patriarchal world dominated by violence. Condensing
family life to poor conditions or marginal activities, Canijo propos-
es an expression of claustrophobia and violence, an endless cycle of
survival that epitomizes the changing representations of Portuguese
cultural identity as a clash between the new forms of life provided
by a free-market society and the old, closed, conservative values, in
which “family” was at the core of social reproduction.
Since Get a Life, Canijo’s filmmaking has drawn on sociological
landscapes and the actors’ own identities to create performative
realities: Rita Blanco living the experience of the Paris banlieue in
the opening credits of Get a Life; Beatriz Batarda impersonating a
supervisor working at the hostess bar in In the Darkness of the Night;
Anabela Moreira adding on several kilos to play a woman in a rural
village in Misbegotten; and the actresses in Fátima (2017) living in
Vinhais, Trás-os-Montes, playing characters before starting their
walk to the sanctuary. Canijo’s process is extensive, beginning with
internships in “real life,” and moving to rehearsals, transcriptions,
and even more rehearsals until the truth of each scene is reached—in
the director’s own words, a process of “contagion.”
To serve this approach, the cinematic style must record the mise
en scène almost as a documentary would. While camera movement
still features prominently in Get a Life and In the Darkness of the
Night, since Misbegotten this fluidity has been far more constrained
and bound closely to the actors’ performances. Blood of My Blood
consolidates this cinematic style with long takes, limited camera
movement, and actors at the centre of the drama. At the core of this
aesthetic is an urge to capture daily life, with meals, the ongoing
sound of the television, non-actors playing themselves, or simple
elements of banal nationalism (religious or sports icons) all coming
into play.
Moreover, sound takes precedence. The soundscapes of Canijo’s
films are a cacophony in which dialogues overlap, creating a founda-
tional mix between the “main” story of the film and the “other” sto-
ries in the background—a contamination with the real. It is crucial to
see In the Darkness of the Night in this vein, as the acoustic process at
play in the middle of the hostess bar dwells between the central family
and the girls making their small talk with the clients. (There is also an
ongoing loss in translation for non-Portuguese speakers, with slang
phrasing or words that connect to the immediate cultural context.)
These films present the other side of the idealized, “good-man-
nered” family, and do it by showing both the surface (in the mise en
scène, or in the superficial narratives of secondary characters) and
the depths, typically inside the homes of the protagonists. Hotels
13

make ideal spaces for this dialectical presentation of society, serving
as façades for a “good life.” Bad Living makes its own case for these
systems of contemporary life within families, one that is grounded
in the Portuguese cultural context but goes further in speaking to
human frailty and inherent conflict. The episodic structure of Living
Bad—which loosely adapts three Strindberg plays—is lighter; it plays
on the surface, but layers deeply when combined with Bad Living. It
is because of the structure of mirroring—or, we may say, zooming in
or out from the hotel owners’ main story—that these two films each
expand when viewed together.
As stated by the director, this project goes inward. In other films,
Canijo plays with society more directly, but Bad Living/Living Bad
avoids almost every direct connection to the visible elements of the
Portuguese social fabric. Because of that, the project is closer to a
therapy of the soul. Canijo has directly stated that the theme of the
project is “mother anxiety,” but, in fact, the films revolve around
those same recurring concepts of family and home as places of vi-
olence and conflict. In a way, this project states the impossibility
of redemption, and creates an atmosphere—a cinematic style and
narrative—that leads to a never-ending tension. With its windows,
frames within the frame, and objects in front of the characters, the
cinematography by Leonor Teles (the young filmmaker awarded a
Golden Bear for her 2016 short film Batrachian’s Ballad) creates a
14
Living Bad
geometry of excess, putting the hotel itself at the foreground of the
story. The wandering digressions of the camera past seemingly un-
important things (shoes, half-bodies, glasses, walls, mirrors), the
complex frame constructions (with its diverse layers in which char-
acters are half-hidden or in limited visibility), and the play between
close-ups, medium shots and establishing shots (of the pool, hotel
rooms, etc.) combine to claustrophobically concentrate time and
space. The dramatic arc consistently bends to long scenes in which
characters (mothers, daughters, lovers) discuss their hatred for each
other, almost to the point of physical violence, which does in fact
sometimes take place. The thin walls of the hotel help maintain this
intensity: we are immersed in these continuous, hate-filled conver-
sations, unable to escape, as if we were within a single family home.
Canijo’s strategy is to construct a banal timeline of daily events
and, from there, to distill the conflicts between characters.
Everything is in its place to apply that daily routine: Piedade’s
(Anabela Moreira) dawn dive into the pool, cleaning the hotel, the
reception of the guests, and the dinner with all its ceremonies (the
clients’ conversations, the stylish lines of the waiters, the organiza-
tion of the kitchen). The contrast between the hotel crew’s “good
manners” and the clients’ conversations fosters the inner conflict
between who we are and the roles we create for ourselves. In Canijo’s
films, characters are always forged by trauma, and their dialogue
dwells between small talk and the reminiscence of those traumatic
episodes; it is as if the characters could not live in the present, but
only in the nightmares they have conjured for themselves.
Piedade in particular embodies this sentiment, which is glimpsed
as well in her mother and her daughter. In the latter case, Salomé
(Madalena Almeida), even if she is young, already confronts her
mother about the disengagement that they both evince. Conflict
arises from small moments in endless disputes over the past; cru-
elty is always present, manifesting in a sudden phrase. This climate
of resentment is also constantly witnessed by other people listening
behind doors. No one trusts anyone, but everyone seeks a moment
of affection.
The main dinner scene, which takes Canijo’s modus operandi to
its extremes, is the essence of the diptych, taking place in both Bad
Living and Living Bad. (Every other film by Canijo, especially Blood
of My Blood, features meal scenes—perhaps because meals, being
perhaps the paramount of daily rituals, is also the prime arena for
ongoing conflict.) By moving between the hotel’s women and the
clients, the films zoom between stories exposing betrayal and bit-
terness. Even if Canijo summarizes the films’ theme as “mother
anxiety,” what they express instead is a “theatre of the world”—en-
capsulated in those “frozen” wide shots of the swimming pool with
all characters present—in which people care only about themselves
and lack the emotional capacity to care for others.
No scene better explicates the duality between surface and depth
than that in which we see Piedade searching for her dog, Alma
(Portuguese for “soul”). Her distressed crying for “Alma!” embod-
ies the characters’ desperation around her. Almost as dejá vù, Bad
Living and Living Bad portray the same scene from different points
of view. In the first film, the camera attentively follows Piedade in
her distress; she is desperate, and her screams are increasingly loud
and annoying, ceasing only when her sister finally finds the dog. In
Living Bad, her cries appear as background sound in the third ep-
isode: in the forefront, the camera, behind a window, shows two
girls in love. They speak about their bright future, and we hear in
the background, almost as an echo from the first film, those shouts
of “Alma!”
René Girard once said that “the mechanism of reciprocal vio-
lence can be described as a vicious circle. Once a community enters
the circle, it is unable to extricate itself. We can define this circle in
terms of vengeance and reprisals…the mimetic character of violence
is so intense that once violence is installed in a community, it can-
not burn itself out.” This is the circle that Canijo’s films speak of, in
which communities—mirrored and intensified in the family cell—
are in a state of interminable and inextricable conflict. The endings
of these works are often corrosive, as daily life—embodied variously
by the dancers in In the Darkness of the Night, the apartment build-
ings in Blood of My Blood, the anonymous people in the sanctuary
in Fátima—blithely continues in the wake of extreme violence. In
Bad Living’s final, harrowing scene, the women fixate their eyes on
absence. The circle will continue—the trauma portrayed in Canijo’s
films has no redemption, no escape. It’s a dark portrait, but it is his.
The Bitter Stems
Living Bad
15
Sentimental Education
Christian Petzold on Afire
BY DARREN HUGHES
“And then sometimes I start lying.”
Christian Petzold becomes bored with his own voice during press
junkets. “I want to tell new stories,” he confesses with a smile. “For
example, I said in one interview that the next movie is about homo-
sexual love or something like that. I’m not very professional some-
times.” I had asked him a straightforward, fact-checking question
about whether his new film, Afire, winner of the Grand Jury Prize
at the Berlinale, would be, as has been widely reported, the second
film in a three- or four-film cycle loosely inspired by the elements:
water, fire, earth, and sky. “Harun Farocki always said, ‘You know,
nowadays, in arthouse cinema, they make movies like modern mu-
seums: just one fantastic building with no surroundings,’” he replied.
“I love the film series of the ’40s and the ’50s. I love John Ford mov-
ies, with his stock company. I want to be part of a city and not to be
in a lonely museum on the outskirts of town. And so I said Undine
(2020) is the first movie of a trilogy. I must say, it’s a little bit of a lie.”
Petzold is currently writing the script for his next film, tentatively
titled Miroirs No.3, which will go into production in spring 2024. “I
have no idea for the third part of this trilogy,” he claims. We’ll see.
A few weeks after Undine premiered at the 2020 Berlinale, cin-
emas shut down, as did Petzold’s plan to adapt Georges Simenon’s
1946 novel Dirty Snow, a pitch-black portrait of an amoral, murder-
ous teenager in Nazi-occupied Brussels. While promoting Undine in
Paris, Petzold and the film’s star, Paula Beer, both contracted COVID,

16
and so he passed the next month in bed, rewatching Visconti and
Rohmer films, reading Chekhov and Richard Ford novels, and de-
veloping theories about summer movies. “My children were 22 and
24 years old, and everything was forbidden for them. They couldn’t
go out, no clubs, no cinema, no cafeterias, nothing. And I thought,
‘My God, what is happening to our summers?’” He was struck by the
contrast with his own youth, in the ’70s and ’80s, when his thoughts
of the future weren’t clouded by pandemics or the existential threat
of climate catastrophe. Revisiting Rohmer reminded him of the
French tradition of summer movies: teenagers on the beach, with
no supervision and little to do. Discovering David Robert Mitchell’s
The Myth of the American Sleepover (2010) and It Follows (2014) re-
minded him of the American tradition: a car, two half-naked girls,
two boys with beer and tattoos, and a cabin in the woods. Petzold
regretted that Germany had no such tradition. “And then I remem-
bered that we had this genre before the fascists won their first elec-
tion: People on Sunday (1930) by Billy Wilder, Robert Siodmak, and
Edgar G. Ulmer. One day, summer, Berlin, young people, a lake, love,
alcohol, dancing—it’s utopia. The world is open to you, like a summer
night’s dream.”
After four weeks in bed, Petzold lost interest in making Dirty
Snow, which was to be about “the end of morality for young people in
the fascist regime.” Instead, he took inspiration from a teacher at the
DFFB who had encouraged students to make films like Rohmer’s,
films that in 30 years would show viewers “how people had kissed,
betrayed, walked, and so on. I liked this theory.” The result is Afire,
in which two young artists, Leon (Thomas Schubert) and Felix
(Langston Uibel), retreat to Felix’s family cottage on the Balkan
coast to enjoy the sea and to complete their latest projects. Leon is
feeling pressure to deliver a draft of his second novel to his editor,
Helmut (Matthias Brandt); Felix is searching for a breakthrough
with his photography portfolio.
After Felix’s Mercedes breaks down—“Something is wrong” is
the first line of the film—they arrive late in the evening to discover
that the little house in the woods is already occupied by the beautiful
Nadja (Beer), a seasonal worker in the local tourist town, and that
a forest fire is raging 30 kilometres to the west. The next morning,
Leon spots Nadja through the kitchen window, mounting a bicycle
in a red summer dress and riding alone into the woods. Until then,
she had been for him only a figment formed by the traces she’d left in
the house: a half-eaten meal, lingerie on the floor, and the sounds of
sex with lifeguard Devid (Enno Trebs) bleeding through their shared
bedroom wall as he tried to sleep.
Afire is a fairy tale by way of Rohmer’s La collectionneuse (1967).
For Petzold, the greatest shock of watching that film for the first time
in decades was discovering that Rohmer had given agency to Haydée
(Haydée Politoff ), the object of desire, in ways that the men in the
film were oblivious to—and that the twentysomething Petzold who
first viewed it had overlooked as well. “It was like a slap in the face!
I asked myself, ‘What is your perspective of the world? Of women?
What kind of male subject are you?’” Leon, then, is by Petzold’s own
admission some version of himself at that age: insecure, pretentious,
condescending, an observer of the world rather than a participant
in it. And Nadja, like Haydée, is also more than she at first appears.
Cinema Scope: Near the end of the film, as the fire is approach-
ing, Leon confesses his love for Nadja, and then the plot turns in
unexpected directions. The final act is open to interpretation, but I
imagine you probably have a very particular understanding of what
happens. Is it important to you that the audience interprets the
end correctly?
Christian Petzold: No, it could be different. After the premiere,
my children had a different understanding of the end. For my son, it
was as if the movie had put things together again. The world could go
on. We have a future.
I read an interview with a Brazilian football player who for his
whole life wanted to win the World Cup. And he said later that when
they won, it was a moment of presence without any reflection. But
then he heard his name over the loudspeaker, and in that moment, it
was past, it was gone. This is fantastic! For me, this happens in mov-
ies sometimes. Movies are always in the present. Even in a historical
film like Barry Lyndon (1975), you see an image of the past, but it’s
still now. It’s always now. But the voiceover in Barry Lyndon is some-
how very far away.
For me, this happens in this moment when Leon says to Nadja, “I
have loved you from the start.” Idiot. For the first time he wants to
open himself up in this moment, but everything’s closed. The police
are coming. Death is coming. He can write a novel, but in the same
moment when he can write a novel, he’s losing his love, he’s losing
his desire.
Scope: How we interpret the shape of the film affects how we
interpret Leon. The snippet we hear from his draft novel, Club
Sandwich, is laughably bad. But is Leon a bad writer? How did you
conceive of him as an artist?
Petzold: I wrote two or three pages of Club Sandwich. It’s very hard
to write a bad novel! But I wrote it in about one hour, these three pag-
es. And I was a little bit proud of it. I thought, “It’s not so bad.” Then,
during rehearsals, the actors, especially Paula and Thomas, said to
me, “This is a really bad novel, it’s so embarrassing.” And I started
to say, “No, no, it’s not so bad.” I was a little bit angry about that—
the criticism. And then they asked, “What’s the title of your second
movie?” The actors in this film are all very intelligent; I love working
with intelligent actors. Like detectives, they understood that in this
artist, Leon, there’s a big part of my own biography. I said, “The title
of my second movie is Cuba Libre (1996).” Cuba Libre. It’s a drink.
And they say, “Club Sandwich? Cuba Libre? It’s similar. You can or-
der them both in your hotel for lunch.” I started laughing.
When I made Cuba Libre, I was playing a director. I’d had suc-
cess with the first movie, so the second movie, I knew, was very
important. I wanted to say to the world what a great auteur I was,
what a great cineaste. We shot on 35mm. There were quotations
from Edgar Ulmer’s Detour (1945). We used many of Jean-Pierre
Melville’s locations on the northern coast of France and Belgium.
After five or six days of shooting, my wife—she was not yet my wife
then—said to me, “What is happening to you? You are playing a di-
rector. I don’t believe you.” I was totally depressed. In two nights, I
changed the perspective of the script. I put away the beautiful girl in
the story and made a portrait of the male subjects, and this rescued
the movie.
17
 I told this story to the actors, and I think they needed to know that
Afire is partly about being a male-subject artist in this world, and
that I’d had this experience myself 25 years ago.
Scope: To make sure I understand your earlier point, at the exact
moment Leon chooses to stop being a pretender and enter the world,
the world closes itself off to him. Is this ironic?
Petzold: No, not ironic. I think it’s punishment. Perhaps it’s
self-punishment, given what I’ve told you about Cuba Libre. He’s open
to her in this moment, but it’s too late. How can he expect a kiss or
tenderness from her now? At the beach, he had a chance and missed
it. The punishment is delivered by the structure of the movie—by the
Sakamoto Ryuichi cue, by the arrival of the police. I’m bored with po-
lice cars in films, but I like the image of Leon standing there with no
glass, no window between him and Nadja, and behind them there is
the world, and the police are coming. They arrive to punish him for his
moral failings—for his bad summer and his bad friendship and his bad
behaviour. Once he’s been punished, he can write.
Scope: My sense of Leon is that when he’s at his worst—insulting
and patronizing Devid and Nadja, for example—he’s overcompensat-
ing out of an insecurity that has more to do with class than talent.
Petzold: I’m glad you asked this. It was very important that we
have two friends from different social classes. There’s no dialogue
about this in the movie, but you can feel it—that Felix is paying at the
supermarket, that he’s the owner of the house, that he has no fear
about the car breaking down because his mother will just buy him
another one. In German private schools for the upper class, 25% of
students are on scholarship, and for this 25% it’s a very hard life, sur-
rounded by rich kids. They don’t wear the same clothes, they don’t go
on holidays with their parents. This is important for me, but it’s not
in the dialogue—it’s in the bodies, in the behaviour. Leon is from the
working class, and he’s jealous. His self-confidence is weak. He hides
behind a hard mask to survive.
18
Scope: There’s another interesting class issue in the film. Afire is
set on the Baltic Sea, in what was East Germany. At one point Felix
makes a condescending comment about Devid’s name. For non-
German viewers like me, is this just the standard snobbishness city
people often feel about the provinces, or does it reflect a historical/
cultural divide between the West and East?
Petzold: It’s a West-East divide. In the former German
Democratic Republic there are small cities with names like Boston
and Philadelphia, and people who live there have names like Mike
and David. It’s a long history, going back to the 18th century, when
people there wanted to start new lives in the US. Frederick, the King
of Prussia, said, “No, stay here, we need you to build up agriculture,
to feed our nation.” And he gave them money and farmland, and they
formed villages named Philadelphia and Boston because that was
their desire.
Two hundred years later, the people of the GDR couldn’t leave be-
cause they were behind a wall. But they wanted to reach the US, to
drive an American dream car, to see California and the Pacific. They
had American music and American literature and American cinema,
so they gave their kids names like Mike and David. But they had to
spell them so that they sounded American, so David became Devid.
My parents are refugees from the GDR, but I was born in the
West. When I shoot at the Baltic Sea, for example, or shoot in the
east part of Germany, when I shoot in places my parents dreamed
of before they escaped, I respect this. I respect the dreams of
my parents.
Scope: Most of your films have a romantic couple at the centre, so
I find it interesting when you expand the cast—for example, the doz-
en or more speaking parts in Transit (2018). In Afire, your main cast
is four men and one woman, and there’s a kind of fluid desire passing
between all of them, which seems new for your work. I’m curious to
hear how you approach constructing that flow of desire, formally. Is
it just a matter of cutting on an eyeline match from one fascinating
face to another?
Petzold: The couples in my movies are always one woman, one
man, so the shot/counter-shot strategy works, but I was a little bit
bored of this, I must say.
Most German actors come from the stage, because theatre is so
important in Germany. Our theatres are the best in the world, with
fantastic actors for the stage. We have fewer good actors for movies,
because cinema is not as important for our social and cultural life.
For me, shot/counter-shot is so important in cinema because you are
in the space and in the tension between two people. When actors are
on stage, you’re never between them—you work instead with speech
and choreography, but the audience will never be inside. Most actors
don’t understand this when they are in front of a camera: they speak
and act for an audience, like they’re on stage.
I talked about this with my actors. Most of them are not from act-
ing schools. We had rehearsals three months before shooting, and we
went to the locations before they became crowded with the produc-
tion crew. They are still innocent, these places, they have their own
dignity. So, for example, there was a table in front of the house, and
I said to the actors, “I think we can use this space when the charac-
ters are talking, or when Nadja reads the poem.” And then I sat 100
metres away and watched the actors walk around. They looked at the
house and trees, they sat down at the table. And who sits where is very
important. Paula sits on the edge, the other guy sits there. They find
their position in space, and they find their position in the group. I like
this so much. It’s like when an abstract painter stops and says, “This is
right.” By finding their positions, they also find out something about
their characters—not by psychology, but by choreography. I watched a
documentary three or four weeks ago about Visconti’s rehearsals, and
they were exactly the same. You have to wait.
I remember this time as my happiest time of making movies, these
three days in the forest near the sea.
Scope: Did you design the house? The windows play an important
role in several scenes.
Petzold: Leon is not part of the world. His working place is like
a stage. He’s always looking at the world through windows, through
doorways. He hears the world behind walls. So, yes, we built the
house, with many windows, allowing access to many perspectives. I
told the actors, “We have built this house so that everybody can look
at each other.” They can’t hide. And they loved it. They each found
the room they wanted and the bed they wanted to sleep in. We built
up the kitchen, so that when you’re in there you can look outside and
inside. And when you’re looking outside, you are on a higher posi-
tion, like Napoleon, like from a hill. This gave the actors opportuni-
ties during rehearsals to find connections to each other and to estab-
lish positions of power or weakness.
Scope: Your earlier interviews give me a sense that your collabo-
ration with Harun Farocki revolved around food and smoking and
long conversations about cinema and economics and human nature.
Has your writing process become more solitary since Farocki died?
I’m sure he can’t be replaced, but have you found other people to en-
gage in those types of conversations?
Petzold: His grave is not far away from here. Remember in Young
Mr. Lincoln (1939), the scene where Henry Ford is at the grave of Ann
Routledge and asks her advice? It’s a little bit like this when I’m writ-
ing and I go to his grave. We have a conversation. I want to remember
the ideas that were very important for us. For example, we believe
that in a film each location should be used twice, and the different
atmosphere of the two scenes is the story. In Antonioni’s L’avventura
(1960), a young woman has vanished but first we see her in a village.
Then, three months later, when they are looking for this girl, they
come back to the same place. Antonioni positions the same extras
on the staircases, and in the cars, and you remember this place as a
place. But something has changed. And this difference is important.
This is something I always have to remember when I’m writing—that
places like the beach, the table, the forest, we are there twice, but
something has changed. Dialogue is not necessary; it’s something
the audience can feel.
Now I’m solitary, but in another way. Now, I’m talking to Paula
Beer. I’ve become friends with more actors, and I can talk with them
about scripts. There is no vanity. It’s very interesting, because I must
say Harun and I, we are male subjects and we are cineastes. We are
architects— you can live in a good script like in a good house. But
I need someone else, too, who can tell me more about the people
who live in this house. There was a woman who was very important
for me, the casting agent Simone Bär, who died six weeks ago from
breast cancer. With her, it was like I had bought a house and could
ask her, “Where are the bedrooms? And where can the kids play?”
She brought a warm energy to this structure.
Scope: I’m sorry to hear about Simone Bär. Did she help cast
Thomas Schubert?
Petzold: Yes. I saw Thomas in Dominik Graf’s Police Call 110 (Bis
Mitternacht, 2021). He’s a killer, and he is fantastic. Then, Matthias
Brandt made a Netflix series (King of Stonks, 2022) with him. Simone
said to me, “The actor who plays Leon, please don’t cast someone
handsome, because the audience will hate him.” The audience must
identify with Leon, and when he’s too handsome, he’s not part of you.
Thomas is a really fantastic actor. He sees the world. He’s interest-
ed in the world, and he’s interesting to the other actors. Simone told
me, “He’s looking into the eyes of others.” And so many actors never
do this—they just look to themselves. But he’s always changing. It’s
another kind of dialogue.
Scope: I’m a few years younger than you, but I think we’re the
same generation of cinephile. When I was young, I could only see a
handful of Hitchcock films on TV. So as a teenager, I would check out
Hitchcock/Truffaut from the library and read those conversations,
stare at the black-and-white still images, and imagine the films. In
hindsight, I think that experience made me an auteurist critic. How
was your understanding of cinema and the job of a director shaped
before you moved to Berlin?
Petzold: Totally similar to your biography. I grew up in a small
town without cinema, so the library was my cinema, and it opened
everything. I read the same book, Hitchcock/Truffaut, an ugly book
in Germany, with terrible black-and-white pictures inside. But I
think you always need someone who opens your eyes and your mind.
You have to be a pupil.
I remember at this age sitting on a bench in a park, and the boy-
friend of a friend of mine was sitting beside me. We were smoking
cigarettes, and I was talking about two records I had bought—by
19
Dire Straits and Phil Collins, I remember! And he said, “This is shit.
Total shit. You can visit me tomorrow and I’ll give you a lesson.” So I
went to his place and we listened to the Residents and Devo and all
of the bands on Rough Trade and so on. He explained everything for
me, and I must say I learned to hear from him like I learned to see
from Hitchcock/Truffaut.
Then, when I was 18, there were film clubs in Wuppertal and
Dusseldorf and Cologne, and there were teachers who would intro-
duce the movies. I saw all of Hitchcock’s movies when I was 18. I saw
all of Howard Hawks’ movies when I was 19. You have to learn to see.
At first I wanted to write about cinema, but then I changed to the
other side. I was 26 or 27 when I became a student at the DFFB in
Berlin. At the time they didn’t want young people—they wanted peo-
ple who’d already experienced l’education sentimentale! I remember
Jean-Luc Godard said, “I have to be 30 to make my first movie.”
Scope: It was interesting to watch Afire and Angela Schanelec’s
Music on back-to-back mornings in Berlin. Both are great films,
and both are very pleasurable viewing experiences, but the pleas-
ures are very different. Her montage is becoming increasing-
ly elliptical, associative, private; yours is classical and efficient.
At this point in your life, how do you think about the pleasures
of spectatorship?
Petzold: In 1991, 1992, Angela and I were in the same seminars.
We saw and talked about the same movies. It was a fantastic time to
learn to see at the editing table in front of movies like To Live and Die
in L.A. (1985). Every day there was a new movie on the editing table,
with fantastic professors like Harun Farocki and Hartmut Bitomsky
who opened our minds. I think there are correspondences between
Angela’s movies and mine. I love to see Angela’s movies. I’m always
totally impressed by them. They are so clear.
For me, the other model was Dominik Graf. You can always find
fantastic American or French directors, you can see all these fan-
tastic movies by David Lynch and Tarantino. But when you are a
student, you need someone who’s nearby, who you can touch, who
you can talk to. Dominik Graf’s movies in the ’90s were like islands
of rescue. I like that he tries to find the balance between the market
and art.
I think avant-garde style is important when it is integrated into
bigger productions, like Salvador Dalí in Hitchcock’s Spellbound
(1945), or the traces of Meshes of the Afternoon (1943) in David
Lynch movies. You need it. This ocean is for all of us, and we each
have to find our way. I needed to find a way like Dominik Graf’s,
where you please the audience and are also an auteur. This is some-
thing I learned from him. Angela and I, we have left our seminar and
we are on the same ocean.
Scope: Afire seems a good example of what you’ve just described.
Is it a stretch to compare its style to Vincente Minnelli or Douglas
Sirk, or even John Ford, where reality is interrupted by flashes of ex-
pressionism? I’m thinking of Leon’s vision of Devid walking naked
into the woods, or that image of ash dropping from the sky.
Petzold: Minnelli’s Some Came Running (1958) was the first movie
I watched with the actors in rehearsals. I first saw it at the DFFB with
Frieda Grafe; it was one of her favourites. At the end, after the death of
Shirley MacLaine, and when Dean Martin puts his hat away, I could
see through her big glasses that she was crying—when she had seen
this movie 200 times in her life. She felt ashamed that she was crying,
so when the lights came on, she said, “This copy is shit! This is not
Technicolor! The reds are destroyed!” It’s one of my favourite movies.
For me, it was very important to discuss this movie with the ac-
tors, and not only because Frank Sinatra is a writer in the film. It has
something to do with this—that you are inside of a dream. This is
why we decided to shoot day for night, as in American studio films.
The movie is inspired also by Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s
Dream, and there’s something in the idea that behind the next door
there’s a park, there’s a house in the woods, there is a night, and it’s
dream work. I often discussed with Harun that in 1895 the Lumières
invented the cinema, and in 1895 Sigmund Freud invented dream
work. It’s a correlation.
It’s an opera, Some Came Running, and it’s also total reality. I
always start crying when Sinatra is reading his novel to Shirley
MacLaine and she says, “It’s great.” And he asks, “What’s so great
about it? Why do you say it’s great?” And she says, “It’s great because
it’s from you.” I always start crying at this moment. This is one of the
best love scenes I’ve ever seen in my life.
21
After Tragedy
On Angela Schanelec’s Music

BY PHIL COLDIRON
It is, by now, a given that Angela Schanelec’s films involve insolu-
ble tarrying with opacities at every available level. Consider Blake
Williams in Cinema Scope 68: “Like Godard, Schanelec presents us
with only enough narrative so that we feel our desire for narrative,”
a situation through which “the primacy of interpretative thought in
the face of the unknown is, again, affirmed.” Or Giovanni Marchini
Camia, in issue 76: “The notion of searching for something essen-
tial yet impossible to describe or even fully conceive represents an
existential longing that has afflicted all of Schanelec’s characters to
date, and which drives the films themselves.” For a some viewers,
this is maddening, even unbearable—the work remains remote, a se-
ries of finely polished surfaces lacking the usual signifiers that pro-
vide points of human attachment. For others, those who are more
comfortable dwelling in failure and ignorance, Schanelec’s films sit
at the current peak of narrative sophistication. Both positions are
captured by a line from Manny Farber on the other director invoked
above: “In short, no other film-maker has so consistently made me
feel like a stupid ass.”

22
 This apparently elliptical approach is not exactly novel; Williams,
for example, convincingly places it within the lineage of gaps and
ruptures dating to the earliest days of cinematic surrealism. The
compositional tropes of various high modernists, Bresson above all,
loom large. Schanelec’s invention, instead, is tonal, a chording of iro-
ny and earnestness which allows her to handle the hottest emotions
without ever being burned. Taken in other terms, this too looks more
like refinement than invention: she is alone among her contempo-
raries in her capacity to reconcile the Apollonian and the Dionysian.
Numbness and distance are not virtues, nor aesthetic ideals, they are
simply the cost of something like honesty, both with herself and with
her audience.
While this Nietzschean conception of tragedy would provide a
tidy frame for Schanelec’s project, its use is complicated by the work
of another Germanic philosopher. In The Origin of German Tragic
Drama, Walter Benjamin sets out on his excavation of the history of
the baroque trauerspiel—the courtly play of sorrow or mourning—
from the position that the defining silence of tragedy was, by the 17th
century, no longer viable: “Only antiquity could know tragic hubris,
which pays for the right to be silent with the hero’s life.” Schanelec’s
most recent features— The Dreamed Path (2016), I Was at Home,
But… (2019), and now Music—sail between these two rocks, des-
perate to hear, at once, the song of tragedy and its disenchantment,
a noise out of which might yet emerge a form capable of acknowl-
edging the particular experience of pain in our time. In light of her
commitment to an understanding that language does not demand
speech to communicate effectively, this is the rare occasion in which
a festival prize is worth noting: at the Berlinale, Music was awarded a
Silver Bear for screenwriting.
The film’s promotional material refers to it as “freely inspired by
the myth of Oedipus,” and so it is. Compared with the incidental nar-
rative constructions of the prior two films, this ordering use of myth
ensures that however opaque an event may seem in the moment, its
place in the logic of the story is equally present, rather than grasp-
able only upon reflection. Schanelec proceeds through four acts of
roughly equivalent length (between 20 and 30 minutes), softening
the disorienting temporal effects achieved in the prior two films by
reintroducing some of the usual markers of time’s passing (a child,
for example, now ages naturally across the ten years of narrative
time she inhabits).
As with the mute fable of the hare, the dog, and the donkey that
bookends I Was at Home, But…, Schanelec again opens on a scene
which dramatizes its own artifice. In the first image, the only she
has made to date which could properly be called Romantic, a bank of
clouds or fog moves in atop a rolling green expanse. After more than
two minutes, the white of the atmosphere has blotted out the land-
scape entirely. There is a single crack of thunder, and, some seconds
later, a sudden cut to what seems at first pure darkness, and is then
quickly revealed (when a figure enters the left of the frame) to be an
overhead view of a clearing within the forest. A man in a red jack-
et struggles to carry another body in his arms. Panting and sobbing,
he collapses, laying down what appears to be a woman in a white
dress. Another abrupt cut, to the same space at dawn from a slight-
ly different angle, returns the film to the daylight it will inhabit for
its remainder.
An ambulance arrives, discovering first this bloodied and dishev-
elled man, his glasses broken, and then, tucked in a stone manger, an
infant. The child is taken in by one of the medics, and we see his wife
washing the baby’s injured feet amidst the surf of a rocky shore (the
first direct sign that we are dealing with the Oedipal myth). Rhyming
the ambulance’s journey up the switchbacks of a mountain, a small
car races into view along a dirt road through another hilly landscape,
this one barren, eventually spinning out and sending a tire rolling.
Four teenagers emerge, the raw and bleeding feet of one establishing
that we have jumped in a matter of seconds from the foundling’s in-
fancy to his young adulthood.
The quartet sets out for a swim, but, unable to bear the terrain,
the young man turns back to bandage his wounds. His high brow and
fine nose betray no suffering. The idyll of this seaside excursion is
ruptured as the remaining three return from the water to discov-
er him being led up a hill by a long-haired punk, who delivers him
to the man from the opening scene. He pins the younger man to a
boulder, and, it seems, moves in for a kiss, which is met with a sud-
den shove. The older man, Lucian, falls, cracks his head; the young-
er man, joined by his companions and his captor, stands staring at
the aftermath, the group’s gazes directed downwards and offscreen
in a typical Schanelec composition. It is only now that we learn his
name, as the young woman calls from offscreen, “Ion!” (The English-
language materials for the film typically refer to him as “Jon”; I’ll use
the Greek, for reasons which will become clear below.)
Ion delivers himself to the police, and the second act begins.
Held in a small jail staffed with women guards, he goes about his
days alongside his cellmates, all of them clad in rather stylish out-
fits of woven vests and slacks, both cream, and, more strangely
still, the raised platform sandals typically worn by tragic actors
on the ancient stage. In a languid series of events, one of the jail-
ers, Iro, who sports an equally aquiline face, takes a liking to Ion:
she visits a pharmacy for remedies to soothe his feet, and deliv-
ers him lists of music to learn. He sings a fragment of Vivaldi.
The guards play table tennis. Ion seems to take up a position
teaching children.
Now free and with child, Ion and Iro return to Ion’s village home.
Their days are bucolic, farming pomegranates as a family, glowing
in Mediterranean light. (One shot, of Iro content in the back of a
moving pickup, brings Schanelec surprisingly close to the lyricism
of late Malick.) As Ion sits watching a soccer match (the semifinal
of the 2006 World Cup, Italy and Germany, which sets the historical
timeline of the whole film), Iro is suddenly moved to call someone
(the relationship is not articulated), and ask after Lucian. She learns
from his mother that he is seven years dead, killed by a student on
the road. Iro coaxes out the name of his killer, confirming that it is, as
we know, her husband. Burdened with this knowledge, she departs
for the rocky cove near the family home, hides her clothes beneath
a stone, and takes to the water. Husband and daughter come look-
ing. Shown in the same wide, long view that introduced this space,
they wait for her, Ion on the shore as his daughter swims. Finding
no trace—we see that she is hiding in the cliffs—they depart, and
Iro emerges. After gathering her clothes, she arrives at a height,
seen only from the waist down. As a lizard scrambles onto her foot,
she jumps.
23
 A brief funeral gives way to the fourth and final act, in which the
film’s construction loosens from the severe rhythmic geometry of
the first 80 minutes to a slacker, moodier lope. Ion now works as a
musician in Berlin. After a rehearsal, a woman who sings with him
encounters the body of a man, just struck by a car; she takes his brief-
case, which Ion attempts to deliver to the police. Sitting in a waiting
room, he seems to suddenly lose his vision, and wanders into the
street. Then a long scene of musical performance, two songs of tepid,
sentimental soft rock, which led me to wonder whether my expe-
rience of the film would be any different if I found them listenable
(I suspect not; Schanelec seems to prefer music whose sentiment
outruns its quality). And, finally, a pastoral conclusion, as Ion, his
daughter, the woman, and a fourth musician visit a river, swimming
and lazing. The film’s closing shot returns to the fairy-tale artifice of
its opening: a long lateral track as the quartet walks along the water
singing, “Oh gods! You can leave me. Oh gods! Why?”
From this sketch, it’s clear enough that Schanelec’s latest can be
taken as a more conventional narrative than The Dreamed Path or
I Was at Home, But…; a summary of either would look far less like
a legible story than the paragraphs above. In comparison, Music
seems schematic—Homer, after all, needed only 11 lines to recount
the Oedipal saga. But considerable complications emerge both with-
in and beyond the film’s simple structure. To begin with, there is the
matter of naming, which allows Schanelec to fold in a range of res-
24
onances. Oedipus is now also Ion, the musician whose tale, as told by
Euripides, markedly downgrades the standing of the gods. Jocasta is
now also Iro, whose doomed romance with Leander remains arche-
typal (she is also here roughly the same age as her husband-son).
This mixing extends to the action as well. The meeting of Ion and
Lucian, the Laius figure, departs from any of the traditional tellings
of the myth and presents at least three overt possibilities, depending
on the context in which it’s understood: Laius is attempting to defy
the gods by reuniting with his son, his overbearing performance of
patriarchal affection misinterpreted as sexual advance; Lucian, as
a character, condenses the Laius-Chryssipus and Laius-Oedipus
dynamics into a single image of violence; or, most simply, Lucian-
Laius seeks to finish the job he failed to complete when he left Ion-
Oedipus in the manger. And where is the Sphinx in all this? She may
be a humble crossword puzzle, stumping the guards. Ion and Iro first
meet when, passing in a corridor, she asks, “A six-letter word for mir-
ror?” A brief pause, and then he offers “ȩȞİȚȡȠ”—that is, “dream.”
All of the preceding are arbitrary choices, and they contribute
little, if anything, to the mechanics of the film as it plays out. Instead,
here we find the retrospective function which has been deferred
from the narrative itself. Teaming again with cinematographer Ivan
Markovic, Schanelec crafts such reliably precise compositions, both
iconic signs and diffuse atmospheres, that the film remains unique-
ly available in memory, its images serving as frames within a vortex
of potential significance. The Peloponnesian light whose clarity
seems to mock the opacity of the story radiates in the mind, where
it demands that we account for what it is that makes one picture
memorable while another fades. Is it only a question of language,
that Schanelec’s frames tend to contain a single thing which can
be named, a kernel for recreation? Or do they impress themselves
otherwise, in a place apart from words? “Scene: a prison shower.
Close-up on two hands clutching a raised wooden sandal, holding
it above an unseen head, trembling with restraint.” This hardly
seems to capture the talismanic power this image holds, of condens-
ing some ancient sense of injustice, directing it towards new ends.
Or does that power flow from the reverse shot: a pair of mute, sho
wering faces gazing upwards, with what we could call either horror
or reverence?
Given that the language of criticism, or even description, remains
too crude to account for the rightness of Schanelec’s montage—the
active and compelling relationship by which a given image interacts
not only with those adjacent to it, but also with the work as a whole—
we might simply call this harmony. But this too seems insufficient,
as the image has yet to achieve the pure form of the note. Still, I do
think that music is what she’s after. In this case, that aim is mani-
fest in the arrangement and oscillation of two areas of signification.
On the one hand there is the myth, which comprises both a series
of historical local occurrences—the lines from Homer, the famous
telling by Sophocles, the fragments of Euripides, etc.—and what we
might call the metanarrative, its existence freed from the bounds of
authorial responsibility. On the other, there is a film called Music, a
series of sounds and images which are not mythic—we can be as sure
of their existence as anything else available to our senses—but which
aspire to that state of freedom where individual cause dissolves
into collective memory. The tension between these two levels is s
evere, the risk of dissonance high. This is the place where modern
music resides.
Any possible resolution rests upon the question of belief.
Schanelec’s Oedipus is innocent; he never arrives at knowledge of
the curse of his birth. There are no oracles, no prophets. There do not
seem to be gods, or, for that matter, God. There is, however, the state,
though an allegorical reading which positions Ion as the sorrowful
figure of Greek ascension to German demands strikes me as brittle,
at odds with the robust emotional core of the work. This would seem
to leave us with the matter of belief as such, with the question of its
possibility in a secular, thoroughly disenchanted world.
Schanelec is working at a moment in which various forces of reac-
tion are working to re-enchant the world through the power of unify-
ing fictions like the nation and God. With Music, she asks us, calm in
the throes of misery and ruin, to look clearly at our broken world and
acknowledge the fullness of that experience. Who, or what, would
we rebuke? The real abstraction called capital seems more remote
than Olympus. As such, the silence of her characters and her film is
not tragic, heroic, monumental; it is not one that will instill a sense
of emergent unity among its audience through the irresistible ex-
perience of art. Instead, it is modern, acutely European, the silence
of the individual whose faith in communication is tested daily. If
Schanelec proposes the creation of actual music, the communal en-
deavour of a band, as one possible image of reconciliation, of joining
voices in a way that they might be heard, it seems relevant that when
we see Ion perform, he alone is visible and in focus. Is this a kind
of tragedy?
25
Aether/Ore
Post-Humanism in Deborah Stratman’s Last Things

BY MICHAEL SICINSKI

Last Things, the latest work from Deborah Stratman, partici-

pates in a small but growing trend in experimental filmmaking.
Following certain tendencies in contemporary philosophy, Last
Things attempts to communicate a radically non-anthropocen-
tric view of existence. But, unlike many popular approaches to this
problem—envisioning a world without “us”—Last Things avoids
the fashionable fetish for apocalypse. While Stratman’s film does
suggest the possibility, even the inevitability, of a world without
the human race and all other known fauna, it works to place this
development into an equally non-anthropocentric time frame. For
geological formations—rocks, sediment, magnetic forces—there is
not a “before” and “after” in the way we conceive it. As one of the
film’s narrators expresses it, minerals can display elements of the
past, signs of what they once were. But they do not remember this
past—or, more properly speaking, their past becomes an integral

26
part of their present state. Rocks “remember” without the burden
of consciousness.
There are two primary narrators throughout Last Things. The
first is Dr. Marcia Bjornerud, a structural geologist at Lawrence
University in Appleton, Wisconsin. As she explains, the Earth was
an active, evolving entity billions of years before the emergence of
what we tend to call “life.” Chondrites, for instance, helped form
the Earth from the elements of the universe—they are “older mete-
orites than the planets themselves,” or “raw solar system material.”
As Bjornerud continues, she notes that the ongoing development of
the mineral-centred planet, with its ferrous oceans and thick, static
atmosphere, was impacted by the eventual presence of photosyn-
thesizing entities. Those proto-plants propagated, furnishing the
atmosphere with oxygen and, in doing so, disrupted the trajectory
of mineral evolution. While Bjornerud stops well short of suggesting
that the development of organic life was an unfortunate accident,
Stratman’s intensive visual analysis of chondrites, crystals, and ge-
ometrical rock formations makes it quite clear that there was an
undeniable beauty and order in our world before the arrival of the
mouth-breathers.
Bjornerud adopts a tone of conversational erudition, but
Stratman’s other narrator is a bit more cosmic in her outlook. This
is filmmaker Valérie Massadian, who covers much of the same ter-
rain as Bjornerud but from a standpoint we might call asymptotic
narrative. As Massadian weaves a poetic reverie regarding the au-
tochthonous anti-consciousness of the world of rocks and gems, it
is difficult to discern whether she is describing the universe prior
to or after the existence of animal life. Her story (formed from tex-
tual passages by Roger Caillois, Clarice Lispector, J.-H. Rosny, and
others) frequently refers to the “last” people, those who have mo-
mentarily survived radiation and atmospheric cataclysm, in order
to glimpse the re-emergence of a geological lifeworld. However,
Massadian’s tale also seems to look back at the billions of centuries
before carbon-based life on Earth. As she describes a future that
echoes Bjornerud’s descriptions of the past, Stratman implies some-
thing much more disconcerting that the circle of life or the return
to dust: it is the eradication of temporality itself, replaced by the at-
tenuated non-time of geology. That is, not only are we a blip in cos-
mic history, but history itself was a blip in the universal organization
of matter.
This is an idea that is difficult for us humans to wrap our heads
around. We can envision our demise with ever more flourishes,
whether in the form of zombie apocalypse (seen most recently in
HBO’s The Last of Us) or hostile alien invasion, à la Annihilation
(2018) or Color Out of Space (2019). But how can we unthink our own
existence, a state beyond mere death? In one of the most recent ex-
amples of our sad failure of imagination, Everything Everywhere All
at Once (2022) tried to offer a look at a “multiverse” in which the
conditions for life on Earth never coalesced. Instead of depicting
lifelessness, an apparently unthinkable prospect within filmed en-
tertainment, EEAAO gave us a dialogue between two boulders: the
mother (Michelle Yeoh) and daughter (Stephanie Hsu) appear on
the edge of a cliff, communicating in subtitles about this static form
of “life.” Then, as if to cement the Daniels’ inability to countenance a
universe without us, the boulders begin scooting around and chasing
each other. The threat of lifelessness is domesticated like a Wile E.
Coyote cartoon.
A somewhat more poignant, if equally wrongheaded, attempt to
concile geological and historical time can be found in the animated
series Steven Universe. It tells the story of the Crystal Gems, a group
of mineral-based alien life forms that have existed within the Earth
long before the development of organic life, and whose mission is to
reclaim the Earth for their own rock-based race. But a wrinkle oc-
curs in that one of the colonizers, Rose Quartz, falls in love with a hu-
man being, mates with him, and gives birth to Steven, a human/rock
hybrid whose existence suggests the possibility of a utopian future
in which organic and mineral life can coexist. In fact, Steven’s gem-
friends, Garnet, Pearl, and Amethyst, develop individual subjectiv-
ities and adapt themselves to human temporality. It is a charming
fable in which humanism and materialism are reconciled through
mutual understanding, even though the story’s linear narrative im-
plies that geological time is subsumed within human history. The
rocks become like us; the end of life on Earth is averted.
Steven Universe is an interesting example of a limit-text, one that
demonstrates an awareness of a non-humanist conception of ex-
istence but cannot actually imagine a cosmos that isn’t governed
by human perception and emotion. (So much for the Rock Era.) An
altogether more counter-humanist consideration of “rock time”
can be found in A Thousand Years of Nonlinear History, by filmmak-
er-turned-philosopher Manuel De Landa. Read as a historical ac-
count of human activity, De Landa’s book is a bit like a speed-round
version of Fernand Braudel. Centuries of lived experience are dis-
patched in a few pages; the Industrial Revolution entails about a par-
agraph. This is because, following Deleuze and Guattari, De Landa
examines time as a series of dynamic forces, matter and energy un-
dergoing periods of stasis and evolution. More specifically, he dis-
tinguishes between meshwork systems and hierarchies. Meshwork,
much like the Deleuzian concept of “assemblage,” describes a weave
of complementary and contradictory forces, some impacting each
other while others maintain a semblance of identity. De Landa de-
scribes this as geological history, in the sense that vertical layers
as well as lateral connections come to form, following the internal
morphological imperatives of matter itself. By contrast, hierarchies
are (mostly) human impositions on various forms of matter in or-
der to subject natural processes to wholly foreign categories, such
as “power,” “accumulation,” or “meaning.” De Landa’s book is a
foundational text in what has been called the New Materialism in
philosophy and theory, an attempt to reconceive history as a set of
countervailing forces and pulsions. Inasmuch as these forces engage
with organic life at all, we and other fauna could be said to hover in
their periphery, of little or no consequence.
Last Things moves in multiple directions, not only in terms of
past and future. As mentioned, Stratman’s film contains two distinct
but complementary narrators. Whether employing scientific lan-
guage (Bjornerud) or a disembodied cosmic testimony (Massadian),
these quasi-narratives are attempts to communicate with (human)
viewers, to articulate this New Materialist worldview, or, as much
as possible, shift our perspective from the linear to the geologi-
cal or sedimentary. On a visual level, however, Last Things is hard
to watch. I don’t mean to say that it is boring or aesthetically off-
27
putting—rather, Stratman asks us to observe morphological process-
es that spurn the usual modes of cinematic identification. Can we
really imagine what it feels like to be a crystalline structure or a sta-
lactite? Such a state of non-being is even more absolute than death,
which can at least serve as a period at the end of a given sentence of
humanistic time.
In addition to these passages of filmed geological processes, Last
Things includes footage taken from NASA probes, showing the
surface of Mars. These sequences are in anaglyph, with gray forms
outlined in red and blue. I happened to have anaglyph 3D glass-
es on my desk as I was watching these segments, so I slipped them
on. Immediately, I noticed that the registration of the contour lines
was slightly off: some forms jutted forward, while others remained
jumbled. There is nothing in Last Things to indicate that viewers
should put on 3D glasses during these scenes, and I think this may
be the point. Using anaglyph as a kind of geological “language,”
Stratman tells us that we are seeing an object (Mars) that cannot
be rendered or perceived using our usual, human-centred modes
of representation.
But instead of using anaglyph as a counter-language to approxi-
mate this geological vision, Last Things gestures toward anaglyph
without actually employing it. Here, 3D video, with its limited capac-
ity for suggesting topographies on a flat surface, is used as a signal for
our own incapacity for understanding. (You are seeing yourself not
see.) And, if you happen to slip the glasses on, you attain only a some-
what different form of misunderstanding. In this way, Stratman
uses the limitations of cinema (itself already a meagre approxima-
tion of human vision) as a material metaphor for the limitations of
human comprehension.
The gesture of using cinema to articulate a set of forces that are
essentially non-temporal is a way of simultaneously addressing the
limits of the medium and of the human imagination. Stratman has
favoured geographical and spatial organization for quite some time,
although her work has never departed so dramatically from a con-
sciousness-based sense of time. In some of her earlier features, she
applies an assemblage-like form of organization to convey the con-
nections between forces without demanding a linear model of cause
and effect. For example, in In Order Not to Be Here (2002), Stratman
combines footage taken from various modes of surveillance with
moments that at first appear to gesture toward the private sphere.
Over time, an overall impression emerges, such that the notion of
security under capitalism is coextensive with the militarization of
private space. For example, for your safety, McDonald’s does not
serve walk-up customers at the drive-thru. If you are on foot in a
zone that is designated for private automobiles—the carapaces with
which we extend our domestic sphere into the public—then you are
in violation of the implicit contract of spatialized capital. You do not
belong in the landscape of private property, and you are a feature of
that landscape that must be removed.
By moving across various spaces without overtly articulating their
hierarchies, In Order Not to Be Here extends laterally, generating a
network of distance and proximity. Stratman accomplishes some-
thing similar in O’er the Land (2009), a consideration of a bounded
geographic space (the U.S.A.) through cinematic assemblage. She
organizes the film through a primary trope, masculinity, which of
28
course is a uniquely human trait. But rather than using the concept
of macho bravado or jingoism to deconstruct the imagined com-
munity of “America,” O’er the Land reads the landscape, or a series
of landscapes, to demonstrate that the American mythos is instan-
tiated through our engagement with North American geography.
That is to say, masculinized metaphors like “frontier” and “wilder-
ness” serve as cognitive maps that rewrite the land in accordance
with hierarchy.
This approach reaches something of a pinnacle in The Illinois
Parables (2016), in which Stratman narrows her focus to explore
the accretion of historical layers within the space of a single state.
In moving across a millennium and a half of geological strata, The
Illinois Parables accomplishes several things. For one, it reveals
the artifice of borders, the control of the landscape through territo-
rialization. But more than this, the film observes the shifting rela-
tionships between human beings and the land, and the many ways
that relationship is conceptualized—survival, ideology, religion,
technological control.
In certain respects, Stratman has been developing a particular
mode of inquiry that uses the landscape—a mostly stable referent—
as the means for tracing the longue durée of human organization.
In this way, her films often examine ideology in order to dislodge
hegemony—that is to say, ideologies, as structures of thought with
which to order the world, can and must compete. But hegemony
represents the end of ideology, the foreclosing of all historical imag-
ination (“It has always been this way, and always shall be”). Geology,
with its obdurate, often inhospitable relationship with humankind,
is itself subject to various ideologies, as In Order Not to Be Here, O’er
the Land, and The Illinois Parables make clear. But geology is utterly
inimitable to hegemony. Try as we might, we cannot corral the shift-
ing sands, and while we may be able to retard erosion through engi-
neering, we can never actually stop it.
As I suggested above, this New Materialist effort to approximate
a non-humanistic, geological vision has taken many forms in recent
years. Fern Silva’s Rock Bottom Riser (2021), for example, considers
Hawaii not so much as a political or cultural formation but as a liv-
ing landmass, undergoing volcanic evolution and offering an alter-
nate point of origin for oceanographic and celestial understanding.
Ben Rivers has been making films about rocks, caves, and islands
for years now, from the utopian landscape revision of Slow Action
(2010) to more recent efforts to abjure a strictly human history in
favour of geophysical inquiry, such as Ghost Strata and Look Then
Below (both 2019). Likewise, Jodie Mack’s latest films, especially
the Wasteland series (2017–2022), explore the capabilities of cin-
ema as a useful, if unreliable, technology for charting natural and
geological change.
But if we wanted to go further back, we could perhaps identify
some films that go a bit further in the direction of non-narrative
counter-humanism. Lest we forget, celluloid itself is a process of
chemical metamorphosis—the interaction of light, film, and devel-
oper produces a material residue, a solid formation of crystals whose
rapid solidification was meant to mimic the biological processes of
the human eye, but without the need for human presence. Jacqueline
Mills’ Geographies of Solitude (2022), for example, supplements its
documentary portrait of Nova Scotia–based scientist Zoe Lucas with
passages of raw filmic records of environmental activity: film stock
buried in different locales and developed, an attempt to allow the
landscape to inscribe itself on celluloid through the movement of its
own matter.
Other such projects have explored the geological substrate of
film without the need for a humanist frame. David Gatten’s What
the Water Said films (1998, 2006) register the effects of saltwater
and undersea light on unexposed stock. The “paranaturalist” Super
8 collective SILT subjected their works to a variety of natural pro-
cesses, such as erosion, magnetism, and bacterial decay. An early
film by Nathaniel Dorsky, Pneuma (1983), consists of rolls of out-
dated film stocks, processed without being exposed to light so as to
reveal their own internal chemical processes. And perhaps most rel-
evant under the circumstances is Ernie Gehr’s 1970 film of footage
underexposed by replacing the camera lens with black cheesecloth,
allowing stray bits of light to “reveal” the filmstrip’s own grain. (The
title of this axiomatically materialist film? History.)
Such so-called “structural” filmworks were both praised and ex-
coriated for their non-humanist objectivity, often in equal measure.
Stratman, meanwhile, has arrived at a distinct but related endpoint
of materialist ontology. In fact, works like those described above
(and many others) could be said to hover alongside Last Things in
an assemblage of their own—a set of related gestures that reject
both blinkered optimism regarding human survival, and those
sensationalistic death-drive fantasies (zombies, aliens, meteor-
ites, and other disasters) that promise to deliver our destruction as
global entertainment. In Massadian’s temporally ambiguous nar-
ration, rocks and minerals, metals and radiation belts, lay claim to
an Earth free of the distractions and depredations of human life.
À l’ombre de la canaille bleue
There is no judgment to be rendered, no “good” or “bad.” It will sim-
ply be a new epoch, with the planet and the atmosphere following
their own molecular trajectories.
One last note about the title of Stratman’s film: Last Things. It
seems self-evident enough that humankind is staring down its
own demise, and, perhaps in the final moments, catching a quick
look at what will replace us. Boiling seas, vast deserts, geometrical
rock formations, a vision of the sublime with no one to behold it. It
is “things”—inert matter, and its epochal state of being—that will
be last, that will last. But I also thought about Heidegger, a philos-
opher whose work often approached an anti-human materialism
but retreated from it, perhaps out of horror at contemplating the
evaporation of his own Dasein. In “The Origin of the Work of Art,”
Heidegger theorizes about “the thing” (das Ding), and what con-
stitutes its thingness. He gives the example of a block of granite, an
object with certain inherent characteristics. In order to perceive the
thingness of the thing, he writes, we must create a “clearing” where-
in its unique character may manifest itself. We must grant the thing
“a free field to display its thingly character. Everything that might in-
terpose itself between the thing and us in apprehending and talking
about it must first be set aside.”
Of course, Heidegger contends that by subjecting the thing to hu-
man activity, we discover its thingness. Only a Michelangelo can re-
lease the essence of the granite; like the Russian Formalists insisted,
it is up to the artist to “make the stone stony.” However, Last Things
offers a very different solution: the material world only assumes a
thingness when confronted, or even manipulated, by a human sub-
ject. The “things” of the world will cease to be things when there are
no more humans, no more consciousness to persist in “thinging”
them. After life on Earth, the Earth may come into its own, a network
of geological forces that outlast the literal end of time.
29
The Nameless World
Bas Devos on Here

BY JORDAN CRONK

A film of uncommon warmth and delicacy, Bas Devos’ Here con-

firms a newfound sense of style and maturity in the Belgian film-
maker’s work that first appeared in the finely tuned nocturne
Ghost Tropic (2019). Like that clearly pivotal project, Devos’
fourth feature—which won the top prize in the Encounters section
at this year’s Berlinale—finds the 39-year-old director levelling up
by scaling down. Gone is the angst and dour social commentary
of Violet (2014) and Hellhole (2019), replaced instead with an in-
timacy borne of a growing interest in the quaint and quotidian.
Just as significant, Devos has found a way to channel both the
multicultural and generational concerns of his first two films into
something far less sweeping and prescriptive. Set over one night,
Ghost Tropic follows an elderly Maghrebi cleaning woman on a
long walk home through Brussels after she falls asleep on the sub-
way, while Here depicts the unlikely kinship between a Romanian
migrant labourer and a Chinese-Belgian bryologist whose fleeting
interactions quietly affirm a sense of shared humanity unbehold-
en to notions of class, vocation, or nationality.

30
 As Here opens, a group of construction workers are wrapping
a day’s work on a building site. Stefan (Stefan Gota) is set to go on
leave, and before heading home to see his mother in Romania he
plans on spending a few days cleaning out his fridge, cooking, and
saying goodbye to friends while his car his being repaired. Over
homemade soup, Stefan commiserates with co-workers, acquaint-
ances, and later his sister, a nurse whose job has also kept her away
from home for far too long. One night during a rainstorm, Stefan
ducks into a small Chinese storefront café where he meets Shuxiu
(Liyo Gong), a doctoral student working part-time at the restau-
rant to help out her aunt while she spends the days studying moss-
es. When Stefan and Shuxiu unexpectedly cross paths again a
short time later, in a forest on the outskirts of Brussels, they bond
over the beauty and tactility of the earth. With a bare minimum of
words exchanged, the two spend the afternoon simply wandering
through the rain-dappled woods, accompanied by little more than
the sound of rustling leaves, chirping birds, and buzzing insects.
Here is a film of small moments and quietly magical flourish-
es. In an early scene, Stefan finds a handful of seeds in his pocket,
which he shows to a local gardener but decides not to plant. Later,
he crawls into some bushes and emerges with a glowing green ob-
ject in his hands. Neither discovery is returned to or explained.
Just as disorienting is the introduction of Shuxiu, long before she
meets Stefan at the restaurant. Over a mesmerizing montage of
trees and blue skies, she speaks in voiceover about waking up una-
ble to remember the names of things; “The whole room felt like it
was part of me,” she says, seeking to convey just a bit of the feeling.
Like much of the dialogue, these words reverberate in subsequent
scenes of Shuxiu researching, lecturing, and examining plants un-
der a microscope.
No longer confined to entirely urban or nocturnal backdrops,
in Here Devos and his Ghost Tropic cinematographer Grimm
Vandekerckhove shoot in 4:3 format, opening upon the natural
world as if encountering it for the first time. Even the construc-
tion-site scenes breathe with an organic sense of space and the
surrounding environment that in Devos’ past work could come
off as claustrophobic, if not outright oppressive. As Devos has
slowly stepped into the light of day, his vision has grown clearer
than ever.
Cinema Scope: How into moss were you before you started
making this film?
Bas Devos: I had a very general interest, mostly connected
with being outdoors—which probably puts me on par with the
rest of world. I grew up in a small village, so I was always outside.
It’s an idea that’s sort of explored in the film: it’s hard to become
intimate with nature if you don’t know nature. But it was Anna
Lowenhaupt Tsing’s book The Mushroom at the End of the World—
which is about the most expensive mushroom in the world, the
matsutake—that initially sparked my interest. There’s a very spe-
cific economy around the matsutake that Tsing links simultane-
ously to a post-capitalist nightmare and a post-capitalist hope.
In the case of this mushroom, she’s speaking about a very specific
plant that cannot be grown—you have to find it. It’s a delicacy in
Japan. There’s been millions of dollars spent trying to develop a
way to grow it, but they’ve been unable to because this mushroom
can only grow on damaged or disturbed earth, which puts into mo-
tion a whole way of thinking about our presence on this planet and
our deep connection with certain plants, like the matsutake.
I don’t know exactly how I got from mushrooms to mosses, but
I think somewhere in the book Tsing makes reference to Robin
Wall Kimmerer, an American biologist who wrote a very simple
book for people who are not scientific, called Gathering Moss. In
that book Kimmerer really manages to convey the specificity and
importance of moss and our connection with moss in a way that
really surprised me, and made me want to go out into the world
and look. She speaks very intelligently about this connection and
intimacy with the natural world. But because I felt both lacking
in knowledge and the right energy to go out and actually do that,
I contacted a biologist in Brussels who took me out into the for-
est. He really made the book come to life: he made me very quickly
understand the difference between this small, microscopic world
and the world of the higher plants, the ones we enjoy when we
walk through a forest. What made me really open my eyes was the
idea that in order to understand moss, you need to stop, you need
to sit down, you need to bring something in close, and you need
to touch—these very sensory experiences. But you also need to be
there, not somewhere else. That triggered something in me, which
I also think relates to what attracts me—or should attract me—in
film, and what often doesn’t. I’m drawn to cinema that shows me a
space in which I can move and where I can be attentive, and which
demands a certain attentiveness.
Scope: One of the things I like about the film is how different
themes and ideas arise and come into focus the further you move
through it, as opposed to your prior films, which were more sin-
gularly focused.
Devos: I think I felt a need to have a whole array of ideas, and
even starting points—one being a simple desire to work with
Stefan. I knew I wanted him to be in my film, but why, and how? I
also knew I really wanted to film this specific building site that you
see in the film. It doesn’t mean anything to people who aren’t from
Brussels, but it’s one of the city’s biggest wounds, like one of those
tower blocks from the ’70s. It’s being torn down and rebuilt from
the same materials, and with that the same problems arise: who’s
building it, and who’s going to live there? These aren’t things
that are necessarily reflected in the film, but they are the kinds of
things that trigger me to make something. So all these things were
present in my thinking, while also knowing that I wanted to end
up with two people looking at moss. How can I zoom into that mo-
ment, into that present?
Scope: Has your writing process changed at all with these
last two films? As you say, perhaps they were less preconceived
than your earlier films. Is that reflected in how the screenplays
took shape?
Devos: People and places triggered the writing. For example,
passing by the building site and knowing that I want to film there,
or in the park where the story ends up—knowing that I’d like for a
scene to take place there, but not knowing what that scene should
be about. Eventually it came down to connecting these spaces,
thinking about how a film could move from a building site to a
31
swamp. I don’t want to diminish the process, but there is some-
thing relatively childlike about the way we went from scene to
scene—like, the character is here, and now maybe he can go there,
and do that.
To go back to the books: as you read things, you fill your head
with vague, very open ideas, but as you write you begin to make
those ideas more concrete. Then it feels very claustrophobic and
you need to open it up again. So in that sense there was a kind of
movement between a childlike approach to the world of the film,
and something more intellectualized.
Scope: Your prior films were also all very urban, whereas this
film ventures out into the natural world. Did you want to move
away a bit from those urban settings?
Devos: Yes, it’s a transit film. My next movie is going to be out
of the city. It was Stefan who brought this movie into the wider
world—literally, by inspiring me to make a film about leaving
Brussels and going away for a while, but also by allowing me to
think, “Where to now?” For a long time this “where to” was part of
the film. There were versions that ended up in, like, a restaurant in
Germany. The idea of the city in this film is fluid.
Scope: The title of the film seems to embody this idea. “Here” is
both specific and nondescript.
Devos: For me, the essence of the film is when the two char-
acters meet in this very specific place, for a very specific amount
of time, on a sort of damaged piece of land. But at the same time,
32
Stefan’s character is very clearly no longer “here.” He still has
stuff to do, like empty the fridge, but his thoughts are elsewhere—
they’re already in another place, travelling back in memory but
also looking forward to spending time with his mother. I think this
says something about how deeply and continuously we as human
beings are never really “here.” Our phones alone are constantly
taking us elsewhere. Even when you’re in the cinema, you have the
whole world in your pocket—and you know it. Even if it doesn’t
vibrate, you know it’s there.
So, knowing that I wanted to bring these very 21st-century
characters together in a moment of actually being somewhere,
and actually seeing each other, seeing the ground, touching
things—“here” sort of sums it up. As a word, it’s both spatial and
temporal. If you say it, you’re either speaking of something that
happened here, in the past, or something happening in the now.
Scope: I’m curious how the diverse cultural makeup of Brussels
has influenced your work. If one thing can be said to unite your
films, it’s an interest in immigrant or outside cultures.
Devos: If you make a film in Brussels and you don’t address
this, you’re not making a film in Brussels. It’s a city made up of mi-
norities. I think other than Dubai, which attracts so many workers
and expats, Brussels is probably the most diverse city in the world.
Among other things, this has led to a plurality of languages. The
first question everyone asks in Brussels is, “Do you understand
what I’m saying? Do we speak the same language?” Because of this
you often have to negotiate the terms on which you communicate
with people.
With regards to Here, my deep wish to make a film with Stefan
inevitably brought about thoughts related to labour migration—
not as a topic of the film, but as a reality of the city I live in. There
are 43,000 Romanians living in Brussels. The Shuxiu character,
by contrast, offers a whole different perspective on migration: she
was born in Brussels, but Stefan looks more like me than she does.
I know it’s a fragile and dangerous thing to broach nowadays, but I
wanted it to be a presence in the film because it’s a reality I live in.
Scope: Is there something specific to Shuxiu and her Chinese
heritage that you wanted to explore in relation to Stefan?
Devos: I came to the Shuxiu character through the writing pro-
cess. Stefan was there and clear to me as a starting point, which,
among other things, did make me think about the pitfalls of de-
picting an immigrant construction worker. Liyo’s character could
have been, say, Moroccan-Belgian. But the fact that I settled on
Chinese opened up a whole other world of language, history, and
images of the future. Say what you will, but we will move wherever
China moves. As vague as that culture and that future may seem,
we have to somehow find a way to relate to it.
Scope: At what point did you settle on this contrast between a
construction worker and a scientist?
Devos: In the beginning I imagined the building site would just
be a hole in the ground. I was thinking a lot about earth—meta-
phorically, in the sense of the ground that you live on, the claim
to the ground that you live on, and also as something you hold in
your hand. But I also started to think about people who deal with
this ground in different ways. Don’t ask me to make sense of it, but
I know that at some point I had an image in my head of a guy dig-
ging in the ground and an image of a woman touching the ground
and counting plants, which I just found weirdly interesting as a
contrast but also as a connection point. It may be watered down
a bit in the final film, but I think this was the root of them meet-
ing. How can somebody be busy in a different way with the idea
of being here? What does it mean to say, “This is where I live?”
How is that meaningful to me? And then to have somebody in-
teracting with the ground that she walks on, but who sees it in a
different light.
Scope: Your two most recent films have a different look and
tone than your first two films. Other than working with a different
cinematographer, has there been a conscious effort on your part
to shift or develop a style apart from those earlier films?
Devos: That’s true, but I think my next film will be different
again. Maybe I work in two film cycles. After making Hellhole,
which was very complicated—perhaps too complex for a 90-
minute film—I felt that I wanted to be able to control the narrative
more. Not in a scary way, just in the way of understanding where
the story goes, and be able to speak about it in a way that people
actually understand what I’m trying to say. While making and pro-
moting Hellhole, I always found myself stuck in how complicated
it was, and I sometimes felt I couldn’t entirely grasp what I just
made. I could feel it, but I couldn’t articulate it.
Scope: There’s a simplicity to these last two films that is com-
pletly refreshing.
Devos: I think I began to clarify in my not-so-clear head that
what really interests me is how people connect, how people can
meet and sense that there’s something here. Like, I sense the
space between us, between our bodies, but I also feel comfortable
with that space, and the intimacy that can arise from there, even
between strangers. For me, this idea of intimacy has brought on
thoughts about narrative and what a narrative should be, and also
a growing weariness of narratives that revolve around conflict.
Scope: How did you and Stefan work together to develop his
character, and has this process changed at all as your career has
progressed?
Devos: We spent a lot of time talking about the project be-
fore even deciding on what kind of character Stefan would play.
Eventually we decided that his character would be a Romanian
immigrant, like him, and from there we interviewed many immi-
grant labourers to get a sense of what his character would be. But
from the beginning there was a lot of questioning as it pertains to
the territory we were navigating—namely, how comfortable do
we feel making a film about migrant labour? We definitely felt the
danger of these ideas.
It can be hard sometimes when you set out not knowing what
kind of film you’re going to make—how can you commit to any-
thing? Luckily, Stefan, being a Romanian immigrant himself,
could relate to the character through personal experience, where-
as I could empathize with and understand all those things that
are left unsaid, the words that are not spoken, that people can’t
say. The men we interviewed were so kind in sharing their sto-
ries with us, whether they were living in Brussels on their own,
temporarily, or staying for a long time and trying to build a life
while their families remain abroad. But at the same time that
many of them projected a deep openness, there was also a sense
of deep impossibility to share what it’s really like to live like
this, to tell of the hidden violence or even the hidden beauty of
the experience.
Scope: Can you talk about the idea of food as a thematic through
line in the film?
Devos: Well, I’ve since come across a text by Ursula K. Le Guin
called The Carrier Bag of Fiction that articulates it better and
more beautifully than I ever could. But before I discovered this
text, as I began to make the film, I was thinking a lot about what
it means to be human—and honestly, what’s more human than to
find, collect, store, and then share food? Le Guin’s text deals with
narratives, and how narratives often concern conflict and heroes
overcoming conflict with the sword. The question she asks instead
is: how can we make the idea of gathering food into a valuable nar-
rative? It’s a hard narrative, but it’s an important narrative, one
that she argues is more important than the narrative of the hero
and the sword that we’ve become accustomed to. I find that idea
very beautiful—it resonated deeply with me, because it’s exactly
the struggle I’ve been feeling, especially after Violet, where I felt
like I did something that I no longer want to do.
But what is it that I want to do? I think it came down to wanting
to make films about people being relatively OK with each other,
and making that into something challenging and exciting enough
to stand on its own.
33
Fitzcarraldo

The Ecstasy and

the Agony
Werner Herzog Plays Himself

BY CHRISTOPH HUBER

“I know it is a great metaphor, but a metaphor for what I could
not say.”
—Werner Herzog in his recent memoirs about the steamship hoisted
over a mountain in Fitzcarraldo (1982)
Making a deserved victory lap on the festival circuit around the
time of his 80th birthday in September 2022, the ever-prolific and
internationally popular Bavarian filmmaker Werner Herzog, eager
to prove that he is not resting on his laurels, came with an entire
package of new works in tow, as well as an exhibition of material
from his personal archive presented at the Deutsche Kinemathek in
Berlin. There were not one, but two films: The Fire Within: Requiem
for Katia and Maurice Krafft (2022), drawn mostly from footage
shot by the two eponymous volcanologists before they met their
grisly fate in a pyroclastic flow emerging from the active volcanoes
on Mount Unzen in Japan in 1991, which is another addition to the
ever-growing cycle of Herzog films structured around “visionary”
imagery, often captured on expeditions to extreme landscapes; and
Theatre of Thought (2022), which explores an interior landscape—

35
the human brain—in typically iconoclastic Herzog fashion. While
Herzog has always insisted that the awesome yet horrible mystery
of the external territories explored in his filmography correspond to
inner states, Theatre of Thought belongs to a more prosaic strand in
his work, in which conversations with experts on a subject are in-
tercut with footage, some of it stylized or at least slightly surreal, in
a way that showcases some of the theses and themes explored—not
necessarily in the way his subjects might interpret them, but rather
how Herzog wants them to be seen.
Additionally, there were two new books, whose genesis was prob-
ably facilitated by lockdown necessities. (These pandemic restric-
tions applied even to Herzog, who proudly recounts how on a visit to
NASA the CEO recognized him and allowed him unprecedented ac-
cess: “Let the madman with the camera in!”) Herzog has insisted re-
peatedly that what he thinks will really endure of his work is his writ-
ing, not the movies, but that may be part of his self-stylization as a
man who rarely watches cinema. Admittedly, compared to the more
than 70 films of varying length he has made since his short debut,
Herakles (1962), Herzog’s written output may seem paltry, though
he considers his scripts as literary emanations waiting to be trans-
formed through the process of filming. But arguably, prose like Of
Walking on Ice (first published in 1978)—about his three-week walk
on foot from Munich to Paris during winter to “save” his friend, ail-
ing film historian Lotte Eisner—and Conquest of the Useless (2004),
which describes the notorious production of Fitzcarraldo, are among
the most pungent expressions of what makes Herzog Herzog.
The same goes (partially) for his most recent two publications,
the first of which, like The Fire Within, is almost archetypal in its
Herzogness, and certainly conjures a Herzog movie in the mind.
The Twilight World is a slim volume recounting the story of Hiroo
Onoda, a Japanese soldier who kept defending a small island in the
Philippines for 29 years after the end of World War II. It is billed
as Herzog’s first novel, even as it bears the laconic (and character-
istically Herzogian) inscription: “Most details are factually correct;
some are not.” The other volume is a memoir named Every Man for
Himself and God Against All, titled after the classic Herzog film re-
leased in English as The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser (1974). In the fore-
word, Herzog notes of the film’s original title that “almost nobody
was able to reproduce it correctly. I am making a second attempt
here.” That attempt may also be considered a populist gesture by
Herzog, clearly catering to a wider audience that may be more famil-
iar with his established persona than with his work as a filmmaker.
Adhering to a mildly revisionist streak that harks back at least to
his documentary My Best Fiend (1999), the book is still somewhat
true to form, less of a straightforward autobiography than a series
of observations and anecdotes. Even diehard fans will be pleased
when Herzog sometimes ventures into hitherto unexplored areas,
despite the presence of many details that are familiar from other
sources (notably Paul Cronin’s indispensable interview volume
Werner Herzog: A Guide for the Perplexed, the mightily expanded
version of what was once Herzog on Herzog). While The Twilight
World was translated into English in 2022 (roughly a year after its
original publication in German), the memoirs will be available to
English speakers only in autumn 2023, so the occasional quotes here
are my own translation. (Rest assured I am doing my best to preserve
36
that unmistakable Werner idiom so beloved from his amusingly ac-
cented voiceovers.) Surely, Herzog himself does his best to fulfill the
expectations towards his more eccentric aura of a self-proclaimed
visionary by closing the book’s preamble with an explanation of why
it will stop mid-sentence, as if he has seen the light (in fact, he saw
a hummingbird hurtling towards him and “decided in this very mo-
ment to stop writing”).
Each of these four new Herzogiana bolsters the claim that he is
above all “just a storyteller,” and fall beautifully into place in the
grand mosaic of Herzog’s oeuvre, which thus should be explored
first. (Herzog’s contribution to opera and some other stage work
is mentioned in passing, since I feel neither qualified nor knowl-
edgeable enough to consider it here.) Herzog’s body of work is not
only given to mythic reveries, but is also shrouded in myth, because
Herzog himself has shaped the master narrative about his work
and done so with unprecedented success—what he has created is
of a piece with the way he has presented it, and himself, both from
within the work and from outside. Some might consider this mere
self-promotion, and they would have a point were it not for Herzog’s
pronounced uninterest in promotion: he accepts it purely as a neces-
sity for survival in a world where art is bound up with economic and
commercial interests.
Famously, Herzog is also quick to reject other factors that are
highly valued or at least omnipresent in filmdom, including intellec-
tual and academic exegesis. Championing filmmaking as an athlet-
ic rather than an aesthetic challenge, Herzog has kept his distance
towards both arty ambition and crass commercialism, although he
would be quicker to embrace the latter rather than the former, as
immortalized in his dictum (in the Cronin book) that “compared to
a good kung-fu movie, someone like Jean-Luc Godard is intellectu-
al counterfeit money.” Just as with Herzog’s assurance that he has
no sense of irony, this should be taken with a grain of salt—as with
many of his other apodictic-sounding claims, one can almost hear
him chuckle as he says it.
Another prime example of this would be his hilarious 12-point
“Minnesota Declaration” of 1999, in which he defends his approach
of striving for “ecstatic” truth rather than the purportedly objective
truth of cinema verité, whose superficial verisimilitude he derides
head-on as “the truth of accountants,” to pile up a barrage of claims
alternately sensible (“Fact creates norms, and truth illumination”)
and absolutely outrageous: e.g., “We ought to be grateful that the
Universe out there knows no smile,” which comes right on the heels
of the precious parenthesis “Nature doesn’t call, doesn’t speak to
you, although a glacier eventually farts.” Then again, Herzog has nev-
er said he lacks a sense of humour, pointing out in his memoirs that
“truth must not correspond to the facts. Otherwise the Manhattan
telephone directory would be the book of books. Four million en-
tries, all factually correct...”
Consider also, for instance, his early short Precautions Against
Fanatics (1969), which may be the closest he got to the New German
Cinema from which he emerged, even as he never saw himself as
a part of the movement (although his performance as “whore-
murderer” in Ula Stöckl and Edgar Reitz’s Stories of the Dumpster
Kid [1971] is worth savouring). For this, his first film in colour,
Herzog used free stock that was considered faulty, and indeed the
 La Soufrière
palette is slightly off, adding another layer of submerged surre-
alism. Even though the film is patently absurd, it is presented in a
pseudo-documentary style, with several people claiming to be horse
trainers and workers—including German New Wave director Peter
Schamoni and actor Mario Adorf—at a Munich horse racetrack vio-
lently ranting about how they have to protect the horses against fa-
natics, and coming off as fanatics themselves. Herzog had just made
an impact with his feature debut Signs of Life (1968), about a German
soldier stationed in Greece during WWII who goes completely crazy
after being confronted with the sight of a quintessentially Herzogian
landscape: a valley with thousands of windmills. Precautions Against
Fanatics may have seemed like a lark made with fellow Bavarian
film people, but in hindsight it’s a small step towards Even Dwarfs
Started Small (1970), which turned out to be one of Herzog’s most
unique films—not to mention most influential, considering the peo-
ple (from Crispin Glover to Harmony Korine) who have cited it as a
major inspiration.
Regardless of influence, Even Dwarfs Started Small’s nerve-
wracking passive aggressiveness remains a pinnacle of self-
destructive anarchy: the little people’s ridiculous revolution pro-
gresses through such harebrained highs as a ceremonial monkey
crucifixion, the ecstatic immolation of potted plants, and a devout
dromedary defecation until the lead dwarf’s demented cackle is in-
distinguishable from a coughing fit. The film is a prime showcase for
Herzog’s steadfast rejection of conventional goals: happiness, safety,
progress, and other social or individual achievements are complete-
ly meaningless for him. Stroszek, the main character of Signs of Life,
is the first of many Herzog protagonists—including the director him-
self—“to fail as miserably as any other of his kind.”
What also comes immediately to the fore in these early works is
Herzog’s pronounced interest in outsiders and loners, which con-
tributed to his image as a maverick and “cult” director (a term he
surely abhors), even as one could hardly consider him a proponent
of the cinema of identification in any form. And yet it is clear from
the start where his interests and sympathies lie. Just consider two of
his finest films from the earlier years, and their moving, yet utterly
unsentimental portrayals—of the deaf-blind in Land of Silence and
Darkness (1971), and of the eponymous early 19th-century foundling
in The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser, a film that is also a pungent re-
minder that one should always distrust authority and the status quo.
What proved even more popular, especially in Herzog’s native
Germany, was his association with another perceived madman, from
Aguirre, the Wrath of God (1972) onward. Herzog’s international
breakthrough became the bedrock for a collaboration with Klaus
Kinski that lasted through a series of widely acclaimed films, includ-
ing Nosferatu the Vampyre (1978) and Fitzcarraldo, an association
that led to Herzog being identified with the monomaniac protago-
nists portrayed by the eccentric actor, with the director’s obvious
37
penchant for remote locations and the resulting tough shoots con-
tributing additionally. And yet Herzog saw himself as just pursuing a
quest for awe-inspiring landscapes whose spiritual resonance were
mirror images of the Bavarian mountains of his youth and of inter-
nal states connected to them, regardless of whether he rediscovered
them in the Amazon jungle, the icy no man’s land of Antarctica, or
the Sahara desert. A key to the enigma of Werner Herzog lies here:
as a self-styled visionary searching for “ecstatic” truth and poet-
ic beauty, he is concurrently drawn towards the apocalyptic, often
seemingly balancing on the verge of an abyss. But despite his tenden-
cy towards exaltation, Herzog steadfastly rejects the esoteric—he is
looking for trance, not transcendence.
All of this is made manifest in his first masterpiece, Fata Morgana
(1971), a film he probably never surpassed (nor would he need to),
despite making his share of great ones afterwards. Even Herzog
himself initially dared not to show it, thinking it “too advanced for
audiences,” until a Cannes screening was arranged through the fa-
cilitation of Lotte Eisner several years after its difficult 1968 shoot
in the African desert. Initially conceived as a sort of science-fiction
film, Fata Morgana ended up closer to what today is labelled as an
essay film, although it still seems to be rooted firmly in the realm of
the fantastic, or even psychedelic. The film’s title is a perfect encap-
sulation of Herzog’s filmic universe, conjuring a desert mirage that
can be filmed, although it does not exist—a reflection of reality, like
cinema itself.
The opening shot of Fata Morgana shows an airplane landing,
again and again. What at first seems to be a repetition turns out to be
a series of separate takes made on a hot day, the heat and shimmer-
ing sunlight rendering them increasingly feverish and unreal. What
follows is a tour, in three chapters (“Creation,” “Paradise,” and “The
Golden Age”), of increasingly desolate landscapes, littered with un-
finished factories and other manmade debris as well as decaying ca-
davers, explored mostly in sensuous travelling shots to music rang-
ing from Mozart to Leonard Cohen. Occasional human appearances,
usually presented in bizarre tableaux, show lonely and loony figures,
most memorably an awkward duo of brothel musicians. The ac-
companying voiceover is Herzog’s edit of the Popol Vuh, the Mayan
creation myth, recited by Eisner and others: “In paradise, man is
born dead.”
There’s both a strange beauty and a barren, seemingly eternal
sadness to Fata Morgana that bespeaks the ineffable, metaphys-
ical qualities and intensity of experience Herzog tries to wrestle
from visible reality. The crux of his cinema remains deliberately
difficult to characterize in traditional terms, unless by resorting to
platitudes, which partly springs from his conviction to trust only his
instincts while considering conceptual or overly artistic approach-
es as reprehensible (to say the least), conventional fodder not even
worth the bother. In that sense, Herzog has always defied the con-
ventions of filmmaking (cf. point nine of the Minnesota Declaration:
“The gauntlet is hereby thrown down.”), and the persona he has con-
structed around this defiance has become a part of what defines his
cinema in the minds of the audience, even as Herzog has always in-
sisted that the films should be seen independent of their maker. Yet
there are and have been few filmmakers whose public persona seems
so congruent with their work to such a degree.
38
One key element of this perception is a slightly later addition to
Herzog’s filmography: when The Great Ecstasy of Woodcarver Steiner
(1974) was commissioned as part of a series of television documen-
taries in which the filmmaker is supposed to appear in front of the
camera, Herzog realized the film needed a voiceover. He ultimately
decided to do it himself, since he was enthusiastic about the subject:
ski jumping. Herzog hardly misses a beat indulging in superlatives:
the Swiss carpenter/ski jumper Steiner “is, for me, the greatest ski
flyer who ever lived.” Indeed, Steiner outclasses his competitors to
such a degree that he is endangered by his record jumps, and even-
tually crash-lands dramatically—which concerns Herzog primarily
due to the fact that “I had to assume that this was the end of our film.”
Presenting himself as an unchecked egomaniac, frequently press-
ing forward with obtrusive questions and constantly given to hy-
perbole, Herzog here comes across as an unformed version of the
now-familiar persona he would continue to hone in subsequent
films. But this recklessness should not let one overlook the ambiv-
alence inherent in the project. Steiner emerges as both a mirror
image of Herzog—one of those outsider protagonists whose titanic
and preferably useless rebellion against all rules and restrictions
makes them ideal (anti-)heroes—as well as a sportsman who deals
in his own peculiar way with the unreasonable demands made on
him. The Great Ecstasy of Woodcarver Steiner finds an ideal balance
between Herzogian mythomania and a sensitive, humanist portray-
al of the athlete under pressure. It even contains one of those mo-
ments that have become a Herzog specialty: a key interview with
Steiner on the soundtrack has no corresponding image because,
per the voiceover, “it was shot in a cabin that was too dark for film-
ing.” As a skillful image-maker, Herzog knows only too well that
sometimes the absence of a picture will be much more effective,
because mere suggestion can insinuate something much greater,
even unfathomable.
At 45 minutes, The Great Ecstasy of Woodcarver Steiner inaugu-
rated a series of mid-length films that make up some of Herzog’s
best work, despite being somewhat overshadowed by his concur-
rent features. Among the highlights are How Much Wood Would a
Woodchuck Chuck (1976), Huie’s Sermon (1980), God’s Angry Man
(1980), The Dark Glow of the Mountains (1985), Herdsmen of the
Sun (1989), Lessons of Darkness (1992), Bells from the Deep (1993),
Gesualdo: Death for Five Voices (1995), and Wings of Hope (1999).
Most notable among these is La Soufrière (1977), a condensed tour
through the Herzogian heartlands of loneliness, doom, and ca-
tastrophe, in which the director and his cameramen Jörg Schmidt-
Reitwein and Ed Lachman depart for the eponymous volcanic is-
land, where, as Herzog’s voiceover confidently assures us, “not an
eruption, but an explosion of the Hell volcano with the force of at
least five or six atomic bombs” is to be expected. With the island
evacuated, the trio sets out to find the last man remaining. “It was a
comfort for us not having the law hanging around,” the narrator re-
laxedly points out, before the hubris of the whole suicidal endeavour
culminates in an unforgettable moment. After visiting the crater of
the rumbling volcano, Lachman discovers on the way down that he
forgot his spectacles, and Herzog explains laconically: “We decided
to pick them up the next day if the mountain still existed by then.”
Later they discover not one last man, but a second, and then even a
 Nosferatu the Vampyre
third, all of them casually awaiting death. “Like life, death is forever,”
one notes. “I haven’t the slightest fear.”
Blithely ignoring the fact that the last man he has been so fer-
vently looking for at the outset has just been a self-made myth is
among the many staggering ellipses and insinuations with which
Herzog fills the seemingly short and linear narrative of La Soufrière.
There’s even an historical digression about a volcanic explosion in
nearby Martinique, which only “the baddest guy in town” survived,
so that upon returning to the present Herzog’s voiceover can evoke
an overwhelming climate of invisible threat: “Because one could not
see a thing, the fear became anonymous.” The subversive potential
of Herzog’s associative way of storytelling is allowed to unfold al-
most unnoticed, while the storyteller portrays himself as another
absurd failure: “There was something pathetic for us in the shooting
of this picture, and therefore it ended a little bit embarrassing. Now,
it has become a report on an inevitable catastrophe that did not take
place.” Surely, such self-aggrandizement in reverse contributed to
the public image of the Herzog persona as a “stubborn visionary,” a
designation he reserves in his memoirs for the Swedish ski jumper
Jan Boklöv who revolutionized the sport by ignoring the rules that
had been upheld merely for the sake of tradition. (One could easily
imagine Boklöv as a Herzog protagonist.)
No less influential are the oft-repeated (not least by Herzog him-
self ) stories of how the filmmaker hypnotized almost the entire cast
of his double-edged tribute to German Romanticism, Heart of Glass
(1976), or how he had the white rats which flood Wismar with the
plague in Nosferatu the Vampyre dyed grey (eliciting an allegation of
animal cruelty by a hired expert), and, most of all, how everything
went wrong during the shoot of Fitzcarraldo, as documented in Les
Blank’s feature documentary Burden of Dreams (1982). Herzog’s
cultishly revered monologues in Blank’s film drive home how much
the popular perception of his films and persona is informed by his
peculiar choice of words, the even more peculiar cadence of his
voice, and the unusual inflections of his accent: German when he
speaks English, Bavarian when he speaks German. (In many cases he
has dubbed two versions of a film, sometimes with slight differenc-
es—as in the case of the bilingually shot Nosferatu—while some of
his features intended for the international market, like Aguirre and
Fitzcarraldo, were shot in English, then dubbed in German.)
Indeed, Herzog’s voice work has become one of the most paro-
died things on the internet, sometimes with quite funny results.
Herzog, however, has said that he remains undaunted by this mim-
icry, since while it may be easy to emulate how he is talking, it is far
more difficult to capture what he is saying. The same rebuke applies
to most Herzog spoofs, down to the recent Documentary Now!—no
matter how well done such third-party attempts may be, the most
side-splitting applications of the Herzog method are achieved only
by Herzog himself.
Nevertheless, this recognizability—which has led to guest appear-
ances on The Simpsons, within the Star Wars universe, etc.—has
surely been a factor in Herzog’s second career arc. After his last film
with Kinski, Cobra Verde (1987), was considered a relative disap-
pointment, the limited exposure for works financed mostly through
(and shown mostly on) television, like Lessons of Darkness or Little
Dieter Needs to Fly (1997), garnered much more favourable results
than features like Scream of Stone (1991) or Invincible (2000). Then,
after moving to Los Angeles with his wife, came an overseas come-
back with Grizzly Man (2005) and Encounters at the End of the World
(2006), both of which notably foregrounded Herzog himself, coast-
ing on and adding further wrinkles to his popular persona.
Grizzly Man, structured around video footage shot by bear en-
thusiast Timothy Treadwell, who was ultimately killed (along with
his girlfriend) by one of the objects of his fascination, even allows
Herzog to set himself up as a clear-sighted veteran vis-à-vis the na-
ive and sentimental Treadwell: “He seemed to ignore the fact that
in nature there are predators. I believe the common denominator
39
of the universe is not harmony, but chaos, hostility, and murder.”
Encounters at the End of the World goes even further, presenting
itself almost like a Best of Herzog, with a voiceover that laments,
with anti-civilization zeal, that “abominations like aerobic stu-
dios and yoga classes” have infested the once-pure South Pole.
Opposing the filmic trends towards “fluffy penguins” and other
feel-good boogeymen, Herzog instead deliberately and exhilarat-
ingly zones in on a lone penguin “heading towards certain death.”
It’s thus that, by now, Herzog can declare himself the “secret
mainstream” in his autobiography without blushing. He also ad-
mits that he can be “just as lazy as anyone” when he is not invested
in working, which is a far cry from the filmmaker who declared,
believably, in a making-of featurette for Nosferatu, “All my films
come out from pain, not from pleasure.” By having persevered
without major compromises, Herzog has become an iconic figure
who is allowed to have his cake and eat it too. Certainly, in many
cases, he should have the right—things he once fought for (maybe
not as the solitary force he claims, but certainly as one of the more
outspoken voices) have now gained widespread recognition, such
as his refusal to accept the orthodoxy of separating documentary
from fiction. (“The line between fiction and documentary doesn’t
exist for me. My documentaries are often fictions in disguise. All
my films, every one of them, take facts, characters and stories and
play with them in the same way. I consider Fitzcarraldo to be my
best documentary, and Little Dieter Needs to Fly my best feature.
They are both highly stylized and full of imagination.”) Apart from
the bluster that’s part of the persona, this maxim still applies: a
film like The Wild Blue Yonder (2004), in which Brad Dourif plays
an alien stranded on earth (and appropriated footage from NASA
and underwater expeditions plays the role of documents from a
space mission), may no longer be as radical as Fata Morgana, to
which it clearly corresponds, but the mellowing of age has not di-
minished Herzog’s characteristically disillusioned worldview.
As underlined more recently by his Japanese sojourn Romance,
LLC (2019), Herzog still echoes the shattering sentence spoken
by Fini Straubinger, the heroine of Land of Silence and Darkness:
“…but the loneliness, the terrible loneliness remained.” Part of
Herzog’s specialty is to coax such moments out of people, or sim-
ply invent something comparable. “The words attributed to Blaise
Pascal which preface my film Lessons of Darkness are in fact by me.
Pascal himself could not have said it better,” Herzog pointed out
with his usual modesty, whereas in Huie’s Sermon one sentence
transforms what would be a flawless example of the detested
cinema verité (and a great one at that) into something decidedly
Herzogian: “If man had anything to do with the sun, it wouldn’t
have risen today.”
On the other hand, Herzog really does have a knack for sto-
rytelling, even though he approaches it from distinctive angles,
staying true to his rejection of straightforward obligingness. He
has given Herzogian versions of the adventure film in Aguirre and
others, of the road movie in Stroszek (1977), of the crime picture
in Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans (2007), or the prison
escape film in Rescue Dawn (2005), which recounts the story of
Little Dieter Needs to Fly as a classical war movie, but most like-
ly the first (perhaps only) one spoken mostly in whispers. Herzog
40
even managed to get financing for a wacky Werner project like Salt
and Fire (2016), an eco-fable with thriller leftovers in which mad sci-
entist Krauss (played by actual scientist Laurence Krauss) suddenly
rises from his wheelchair, explaining that he only uses it “when I’m
tired of life.”
Salt and Fire takes place on a salt flat next to a super volcano, and
this brings us to the closing of the circle: a distinctive filmmaker like
Herzog can’t help revisiting the same ideas and subjects, even when
he appropriates material from others. His latest use of found foot-
age is most telling in this respect, as The Fire Within is also a belat-
ed answer to La Soufrière, with the key distinction that the Kraffts
actually perished during their volcano studies. Many of the scenes
and voiceover interjections by Herzog thus take on additional mean-
ings, while the core mission, hammered home by the overbearing
music of Ernst Reijsegger (but then again the film is a requiem, and
Herzog has never withheld on that front), is pursued with deliberate
single-mindedness. “What I’m trying to do here is to celebrate the
wonder of their imagery,” Herzog announces at the beginning of the
film, and despite delivering several object lessons in film criticism
while presenting the directorial development of the Kraffts, he can’t
help succumbing to their power in the end: “They were able to de-
scend into the inferno and wrestle an image from the very claws of
the devil.”
Indeed, a few of the most impressive shots of floating lava land-
scapes—“a vision that exists only in dreams”—were already seen in
Herzog’s volcano rondo Into the Inferno (2017), which belongs to
his post-Encounters cycle of films that explore subjects that pique
his interest, including the internet in Lo and Behold (2016) or brain
science in Theatre of Thought. I tend to enjoy these films enormous-
ly, and then forget most of them, because they are exactly like what
you’d expect—which is why they are so enjoyable in the first place.
Still, I also find it a bit too easy when Herzog resorts to inserting
prepared jokes he knows the audience will lap up, so one of the few
things that still stands out in my brain is the quip accompanying a
mathematical explanation: “I understand nothing of it, and I assume
many of you don’t either.”
But even these minor Herzog shows are full of pertinent digres-
sions, whether ecological or social—the latter of which is more dom-
inant in Theatre of Thought, which finds an equal measure of fas-
cination and fear in the possibilities of technology as Herzog does
elsewhere with nature. This is also a reminder that the same Herzog
who boldly declares in his memoirs that “I think the 20th century
has been a mistake in its entirety” is flabbergasted some pages on
by the sheer amount of technological game-changers he has expe-
rienced in his relatively brief lifetime. If his other recent book The
Twilight World tries, with considerable success, to give poetic ex-
pression in words to the enigmatic and inspiring ideas and emo-
tions that Herzog has previously managed to capture on film, then
Every Man for Himself and God Against All is more a victory lap that
brings together much of what Herzog has said on other occasions,
with a few previously unheard nuggets on top. But, firstly, he still
recounts these better than anybody else, and, secondly, I’m even
inclined to agree with his assessment: “I always preferred if peo-
ple steal from me rather than if they don’t.” And that should even
include himself.
 Get Back

In Search of the
Miraculous :

Notes on Some Recent Music Documentaries

BY MAX GOLDBERG

J. Hoberman counted Fire Music among the best films of 2021, but
his capsule review sings a different tune: “Not a great documentary,”
he begins, “but an effective reminder that…” Say no more. I find it al-
most touching that a hardcore cineaste like Hoberman should coun-
tenance such an ungainly film for the sake of “Cecil Taylor, Ornette
Coleman, Albert Ayler, et al.” For music like that, anything. Still, we
might ask of the film itself: why this lack of, well, fire? Director Tom
Sturgal organizes his history like a Wikipedia entry, dutifully split
between big names and rough chronology. In spite of some remarka-
ble archival material—much of it from earlier films like Ron Mann’s
Imagine the Sound (1981) and Robert Mugge’s Sun Ra: A Joyful Noise
(1980)—the film is in such a hurry to cover ground that it never finds
much of anything out. That a film about musicians who resisted and
then reinvented structure should itself struggle to impose a unifying
account on their art is an irony beyond its grasp.

41
 Amazing Grace
Fire Music, it should be said, is hardly the worst offender in this in-
creasingly crowded field. The fact that every musical artist with the
slightest shred of mystique now seems to rate 90 minutes is the log-
ical consequence of the music documentary being such a cinch for
content, securing a built-in audience for streaming platforms and
festivals hungry for a marquee guest. A handful of recent works show
that interesting things can be done with the music documentary, but
in most cases the film itself is a mere way station between fundrais-
ing pitch and think piece. This is a problem for documentaries more
generally, but it hurts more when it’s music.
***
For fans, the allure of the music documentary lies in its promise
of some unseen glimpse of a band in their prime, and with it a return
to one’s first feelings for the music. Producers know this, trading on
performance footage in trailers. But again and again in the finished
films, this material is spoken over or otherwise abridged. Whatever
they say, the music documentary gets jittery in the face of actual
music. Perhaps it’s not so surprising: the most potent element of the
movie—in some real sense its reason for being—is the one thing the
filmmaker had no part in. Is it so hard to imagine this situation cre-
ating ambivalence, even anxiety? The film needs to do something, so
it cuts.
I think of the heart-stopping footage of Nina Simone singing
“Feelings” at the 1976 Montreux Jazz Festival. What Happened, Miss
Simone? (2015) clearly grasps the gravity of the performance, allow-
ing it to run for several minutes at a dramatic climax. But when it
cuts, it does so with a sound bridge straight out of the VH1 Behind
the Music playbook. In cutting directly to an interview in which
Simone describes her money troubles, the performance is made to
serve a story arc, and thereby sapped of its essential intensity. Were
the footage allowed to play through, What Happened, Miss Simone?
42
would be a very different kind of film—one arguably more in tune
with its subject’s abandon.
Whatever its shortcomings, What Happened, Miss Simone? is
quite moving as a daughter’s troubled reckoning with her moth-
er’s legacy (Lisa Simone, one of the film’s primary witnesses, is also
its executive producer). It’s no wonder that the raw emotion of
“Feelings” would mean something very different to her than to an
admirer like Ja’Tovia Gary, whose terrific experimental essay, The
Giverny Document (2019), lingers over the same Montreux footage.
Gary doesn’t let “Feelings” play through, either—rather, it keeps re-
appearing throughout The Giverny Document, haunting, taunting, a
thing in itself.
***
A few years ago, I went with a friend to an Oakland gallery to see
an illustrated lecture billed as “A Cosmic and Earthly History of
Recorded Music.” The presenter, Eric Isaacson, is the founder of
Mississippi Records, a store and record label dedicated to musical
miracles. When we arrived, there wasn’t enough space to open the
door. I remember being disappointed, but also amazed that all these
people showed up for scraps of deep song. So of course we’re easy
marks for the music documentary, since even the lamest offers some
compensating morsel, like learning in the otherwise execrable Once
Were Brothers: Robbie Robertson and the Band (2019) that Bob Dylan
gifted a dog named Hamlet to the boys at Big Pink. Virginia Woolf
might have been describing films like these when she wrote, in 1925,
“Often, indeed, we bring back some invaluable trophy, for Victorian
biographies are laden with truth; but always we rummage among
them with a sense of the prodigious waste, of the artistic wronghead-
edness of such a method.”
I ended up catching Isaacson’s road show the next night in San
Francisco. After ranging through some wilds of 20th-century music,
he closed with the same footage of Simone at Montreux. When she
was done, so was the show.
It seems significant, given the music documentary’s retrospective
charge, that one of the first would chronicle the great hero of the
concert film. Hendrix (1973) was made in the months after the gui-
tarist’s death, and the nearness of the loss is felt in the way the film
clings to its concert footage. Abridged, these performances would
mainly illustrate Hendrix’s showmanship; in full, they show how he
moves through a song, his sway over time.
Hendrix’s blocky cutting between reminiscence and perfor-
mance feels like something that might be assembled for a memorial
service—that is, with urgency. Viewed today, the grab bag of inter-
views restores a sense of contingency to Hendrix’s life, with fresh
insight coming from both intimates (a girlfriend describes his gid-
diness over a new Dylan album) and sympathetic observers (you
wouldn’t dream of a contemporary Hendrix documentary talking
to someone like Germaine Greer, but here she is noting the troubled
racial dynamics of Hendrix’s relationship with his audience). The
film offers no grand summation, no last word; it only wants to pick up
the pieces.
***
The storied music producer Joe Boyd worked on Hendrix dur-
ing a brief spell at Warner Bros. negotiating soundtrack clearances
(among other credits, he helped broker the inclusion of the Leonard
Cohen tunes in McCabe & Mrs. Miller [1971]). In White Bicycles, his
charming memoir of the ’60s, Boyd recalls analyzing performance
footage for Hendrix and being captivated by a single camera angle on
the Isle of Wight show:
We were particularly impressed with Camera 5, Nic Knowland’s
camera from stage right. During “Red House,” Knowland focuses on
the microphone in profile as Jimi leans in to sing a line, then resists the
temptation to follow as Jimi backs away to play a guitar lick. With the
left side of the frame filled with aquamarine light and mist, Jimi’s face
suddenly darts back in through the haze as he delivers the next line.
The shot is so musical, the viewer is pulled into the metre and flow of
the song.
Boyd made his living being alert to this subtle quality of musicali-
ty; strange to say, it’s precisely what’s missing from most music docu-
mentaries. A film like Moonage Daydream (2022) cannot fathom the
space between the notes.
***
At Warners, Boyd was also involved in Sydney Pollack’s ill-fated
documentary of Aretha Franklin’s gospel homecoming at the New
Temple Missionary Baptist Church in Los Angeles. The story goes
that Pollack’s crew, unprepared for the exigencies of live perfor-
mance, failed to sync sound and picture. Pollack moved on to his
next project, leaving the footage in legal and technological disarray.
Year later, producer Alan Elliot secured the elements and assembled
a cut. On his website, Boyd suggests Elliot’s version is likely superior
to what Pollack would have produced: “I had the impression from a
few 1972 conversations that Pollack was planning to interview all the
principals and build an interview-filled music documentary around
the footage of those two evenings. Alan turned in the opposite direc-
tion: no talking heads, no analysis, no one leading the audience by
the hand, no alerts about what you’re about to see.”
It was only after Franklin’s death that her estate gave its blessing,
and Amazing Grace finally saw the light of day in 2018. For those long
familiar with the double album of the same name, actually seeing
the music is revelatory. Even with Pollack’s crew bumbling around
and Mick Jagger in the audience, gospel still does its work, wiring up
preacher to chorus, chorus to church. The choir is a marvel to watch,
responding individually to the music while they sound the whole.
Franklin stands rock-still at the dais, putting everything into her
voice; at one point we see Rev. James Cleveland place a supporting
hand behind her back. For the film’s final refrain, he holds the mic for
Franklin to sing. In one fluid motion, she takes the mic, stands from
beside the piano, and finally turns towards the chorus: “Can I get y’all
to help me say/So glad that I’ve got the religion.” They raise the roof
for a climax that only shows up on film.
For me, the story of Amazing Grace serves as a kind of parable,
articulating our wildest hopes for the music documentary: to bring
sound and image back into alignment, to make the music whole again.
***
Careful what you wish for. For Get Back (2021), Peter Jackson’s
production team brought all its technical wizardry to bear on
Michael Lindsay-Hogg’s 16mm footage of the troubled Let It Be ses-
sions. Jackson refers to the resulting enhancements as “restoration,”
driving actual film archivists nuts. Leaving aside questions of taste—
the punchy colours, in particular, reflect a distinctly contemporary
bias—the same deepfake technology used to “complete” Lindsay-
Hogg’s footage could just as easily be used to fabricate scenes out of
whole cloth. Jackson swears fidelity, but Paul McCartney recognized
the holographic possibilities when deploying footage of Lennon
singing “I’ve Got a Feeling” on his recent stadium tour.
In spite of my misgivings about Jackson’s enterprise, there’s no
escaping that Get Back is an incredible film—“the Out 1 of music doc-
umentaries,” per Cinema Scope editor Mark Peranson. It turns out
that the Beatles’ popularity still permits a level of obsessiveness and
experimentation otherwise unimaginable on the big stage. Anyone
who’s ever worked in a recording studio or editing suite will recog-
nize the particular insanity that develops in this most unnatural
situation. Indeed, there’s a delicious irony to Jackson’s cutting-edge
technology being applied to footage documenting such grubby psy-
chodynamics, for in spite of the band’s melodic eloquence, emotion-
ally they were stuck at their teenage founding. Throughout the film,
the audience is in the strange, almost parental position of waiting for
them to make it to, and through, their own songs.
After all the indecision about whether to perform the songs live—
Lindsay-Hogg proposes various colonialist fantasies that would
make Spinal Tap blush—the Beatles of course succeed in creating
one last indelible image of themselves as a band. Once on Apple’s
rooftop, they forget themselves: Paul titters nervously, George peeks
over the side of the building, Ringo hugs his girlfriend, and John’s
harsh sarcasm finally burns off. We remember that the Beatles were
a great band for all the ordinary reasons, too. With assistants stalling
43
hapless policemen, it’s suddenly A Hard Day’s Night (1964) all over
again. But we know from a thousand heist films that you only head
for the roof as a last resort.
Lindsay-Hogg plays the fool in Get Back, but his footage of the
Beatles is beyond question. For Alain Gomis’ Rewind & Play (2022),
by contrast, the production elements of a French television program
featuring Thelonious Monk demand interrogation. A title card ex-
plains: “In December 1969, Thelonious Monk ended his European
tour with a concert in Paris. In the afternoon, he recorded a program
for French television, Jazz Portrait. We found the footage.”
Crucially, this bit of context is held until the end of the film, such
that at the beginning we’re dropped without explanation into B-roll
of Monk and his wife Nellie arriving at the Paris airport. The awk-
wardness of their small talk in a cab, recorded incidentally, sets up
the more excruciating exchange between Monk and Jazz Portrait
host Henri Renaud. The framing of this interview, with Renaud
leaning over the piano, toggling between questions in English and
comments in French that Monk doesn’t understand, is unsettling
enough, but it’s the unedited run of repeated takes that lay bare the
coercive trappings of an ostensibly neutral television discourse.
When Monk is asked about his first trip to Paris in 1954, he recalls
not being paid well for a concert. Between takes, Renaud tries to
steer him away from this unpleasant detail; when Monk repeats it
during a second take, the host tells the producer to cut it out alto-
gether. Later, Monk gives a sidelong glance when asked about his
classical training—responding, perhaps, to the insinuation that the
pianist’s artistry is best appreciated in terms that uphold a tradition-
al, racialized hierarchy of aesthetic value. Gomis simply allows these
microaggressions to play out, much as he retains the technological
artifacts that mark the footage in time. He finds counterpoint in
camera takes probably not meant for broadcast: an extreme close-
up of Monk’s beard hairs, for instance, is at once beautiful and intru-
sive, and as such a fine homage to the pianist’s genius for balancing
clashing tones.
Rewind & Play brings to light the violence of getting an artist to
say what you want them to say. Not coincidentally, it also centres the
musical performances recorded for Jazz Portrait, allowing them to
flow together as a solid block of song. Taken together, the two things
insinuate a sharp critique of the standard music documentary. Monk
is brilliant at the piano, letting the final note of each tune sustain to
the last hint of sound. Stalked by dead air and bored crew, he appears
terribly, magnificently alone. One comes away freshly convinced
that tunes like “Crepuscule with Nellie” and “’Round Midnight” are
truly indomitable, but any romantic notions of the music as a site of
resistance or respite are pre-empted by Renaud, off camera, asking
for another song: “Can you play one medium tempo again?” Monk
sighs and asks for assurance that it’s just “one tune and that’s it.”
In the final act of Rewind & Play, it’s Renaud who appears alone
before the camera, running through retakes of his editorials and
modelling thoughtful looks for cutaways. Gomis follows the footage
in landing this knockout punch, but he does so at the risk of over-
simplifying his film’s analysis. It’s worth noting that Renaud comes
across as a genuine friend to Monk in Robin Kelly’s biography, a book
expressly written against reductive accounts of Monk’s artistry. Of
the completed episode, Kelly writes:
44
The half-hour Jazz Portrait: Thelonious Monk offered a rare
glimpse of Monk sitting comfortably before a nine-foot Steinway, per-
forming a variety of solo piano pieces between conversations with, and
commentary by, Renaud. The setting is relaxed and Thelonious plays
beautifully…He may not have understood most of Renaud’s French, but
he knew he was being treated with respect.
Reading this after Rewind & Play makes for a cognitive disso-
nance that is itself revealing of the cultural politics involved in the
French appreciation of American jazz (further complicated here
by the fact that Rewind & Play represents an archival intervention
made by a French-Senegalese filmmaker). Renaud undoubtedly oc-
cupies a position of power in Jazz Portrait, but perhaps he too was
contorting himself for the sake of presenting Monk’s music to a wid-
er—and whiter—audience.
***
In a 2019 podcast interview, Questlove speaks of returning from
an early trip to Tokyo with a suitcase full of VHS tapes of Soul Train
and other vintage television. What’s striking about this story isn’t so
much the now-unimaginable scarcity of this material as its status as
primary text for a younger generation looking to make close study of,
say, Clyde Stubblefield’s breaks. For Questlove, there doesn’t seem
to be any great leap from his sourcing VHS in Tokyo to winning the
Oscar for Summer of Soul (2021). The film opens with a young Stevie
Wonder’s showboating on drums in the rain—exactly the kind of
thing, one imagines, that the Roots drummer was hoping to find in
those stalls.
After this exuberant opening, Summer of Soul settles into a
conventional approach to chronicling the 1969 Harlem Cultural
Festival, interleaving performances with talking heads, explanato-
ry titles, and other mainstays of the music documentary. While the
talking-head format is undoubtedly conventional, it still makes a
great deal of difference who is talking. I would happily listen to Greg
Tate, who died this past year, at feature-length: his brief lesson here
on the elements of Sly Stone does the rare thing of substantively
adding to the performance footage. For speakers lacking Tate’s gift
of gab, it helps to give them something to do. Questlove films mem-
bers of the Fifth Dimension watching their own performance 50
years earlier, and their poignant facial expressions say plenty. Scott
Walker: 30 Century Man (2006) interviews its speakers as they play
back Walker’s old records, an effective way of maintaining presence
of mind. Place works, too: the Minutemen doc We Jam Econo (2005)
has the good sense to just get in the van with Mike Watt.
***
Even with best intentions, it takes a gifted interlocutor to steer
speakers away from merely acting, as Lucy Sante once put it, as one
of “those friends of the brilliant young dead who go on to spend the
rest of their lives reselling their anecdotes and testifying in docu-
mentaries.” The fact that The Velvet Underground (2021) limits its
interviews to those with direct experience of the band is only nota-
ble insofar as Todd Haynes focuses attention on what is still fresh in
those experiences, so that we get Amy Taubin’s frustration with the
sexual politics of the Factory scene or Mo Tucker’s deadpan diss of
flower power. John Cale and La Monte Young can offer a technical

gloss on frequency patterns, but it’s up to the modern lover Jonathan
Richman to tell how it felt: “You could watch them play, and there
would be overtones that you couldn’t account for.” He looks around,
freshly awestruck: “Where is it coming from?”
Haynes gets at the spell by casting one of his own. The film is
loud, for one thing, with a dynamic mix drawing heavily from dem-
os and alternate takes. Visually, it’s soaked in signifiers of the New
York underground; as with his period dramas, Haynes takes evident
pleasure in setting the scene. What impresses most is the film’s epic
form, which is both densely detailed and pulled steadily forward as
if by fate. The deft use of split screen creates a delicious sense of
time bending around events, fast and slow. Introducing Reed and
Cale, the left side of the screen flashes through biographical shrap-
nel while the right side stays trained on Warhol’s gorgeous screen
tests of the two played at the intended slowed frame rate, absorbing
each breath.
So gradual is the film’s build towards Reed and Cale’s star-crossed
meeting that I found myself wondering how Haynes could possi-
bly do justice to the second half of the band’s brief life. In fact, he
doesn’t, but how refreshing for a music documentary to advance
an actual point of view in the way it assigns importance to past
events—which, for Haynes, means that with all regrets to Doug
Yule, the Velvet Underground was the meeting of Reed and Cale
(the third protagonist to receive a title card is New York City) and
everything else epilogue. Case in point, the swell of “Ocean” car-
ries us from Reed walking out on the band at Max’s Kansas City all
the way through the solo years. It’s typical of the acuity of Affonso
Gonçalves’ editing that in the midst of this sudden rush through
time, the film finds a fleeting match between Reed’s retreat to
his childhood home with the lyric, “I am a lazy son/I never get
things done.”
In the absence of performance footage of the Velvets, of which
there is precious little that exists, Haynes leans on the films of New
The Velvet Underground
American Cinema to motor his montage. Warhol may be top ba-
nana, but he shares screen time with Jonas Mekas, Marie Menken,
Kenneth Anger, Barbara Rubin—who first hipped the Factory crowd
to the band and was responsible for, in the words of Danny Fields
(himself the subject of a middling doc), “those fucking polka dots”
projected over the early Velvets shows—Jack Smith, Stan Brakhage,
Warren Sonbert, and other standbys of the Filmmakers Cooperative
circa 1967. (Whoever negotiated permissions for the film, not least
from the notoriously recalcitrant La Monte Young, deserves a med-
al.) There’s no question that these films help illustrate the condi-
tions of the first album, but the appropriation still touched off old
avant-garde anxieties. Haynes’ grafting of experimental classics may
be opportunistic, but it also goes to the heart of his project. For if the
film is nostalgic for anything, it’s for the closeness of music and new
cinema—the sense that, in this time and place, they were speaking
the same language. Not for nothing is this Velvet Underground finally
dedicated not to Lou Reed, but to the great connector Jonas Mekas.
The film ends with Reed, Cale, and Nico’s performance for French
television in 1972. It’s a strange concert, too early for a reunion but in
every other way very late. “It took us awhile to get here,” Reed dead-
pans, as a bruised take of “Heroin” begins to unfurl. Slowly, almost
imperceptibly at first, the already ghostly television image fades to
black. The film remains entranced by its subject to the very last, end-
ing on a note not of vindication but of actual absence, rippling out.
As Taubin notes of the parallel between La Monte Young’s music and
Warhol’s films, “It’s all about expanding time.”
***
The Velvet Underground models one vision of the music docu-
mentary as a kind of séance; for a more embodied take on the form,
there is Milford Graves Full Mantis (2018). Graves was a key figure in
the history chronicled by Fire Music, but Jake Meginsky’s film has
nothing to say about “free jazz” for the simple reason that it wants
45
to understand the music from the inside out. The difference is clear
from the opening slow camera zoom out from the mirror image of a
mask (more Michael Snow than Ken Burns). A fiery solo for drum
and voice scores a montage of various figures in Graves’ home—him-
self included, beatific in the garden—with a cymbal crash leading
into archival footage of the drummer performing in a super-ener-
getic quartet in 1973. With the crowd’s applause still sounding, the
image bridges back to Graves at home, staccato split screens keeping
time with his hand drum. We’re ten minutes into the film, and still
not a word.
From here, Meginsky shows the Queens neighbourhood where
Graves lives and the house that is an extension and expression of his
boundless art, with an exterior adorned by his funky mosaics and
interior that’s equal parts laboratory, dojo, apothecary, and studio.
He sits for the camera, talking about his garden. The documentary
has begun, in other words, but not before retuning our senses to take
fuller measure of this life’s work. Leaving chronological account-
ing to Wikipedia, Meginsky harnesses cinema’s qualities of light,
duration, and sound to present Graves’ multifaceted inquiries into
rhythm; the film’s non-linear approach accords equal significance to
his engagements with drumming, martial arts, gardening, and car-
diology. (As critic John Corbett observes, “Many of these seemingly
disparate activities circulate around a basic involvement in studying
the human body and the influences of sound on it.”)
A modern Leonardo, Graves was heedless of the arbitrary bounda-
ry lines between disciplines; rather, he was himself disciplined by his
autodidact’s passion for getting at the source of things. Developing
his own distinct form of the eponymous martial arts style, he made
a point of observing the movements of actual praying mantises.
Investigating heart rhythms, he personalized software intended
for industrial use. Munching some water spinach straight from the
stalk, he explains that eating this way gets “all the cosmic energy
that’s circulating around in there.” Similarly, Meginsky’s approach
stems from the basic proposition that Graves’ wisdom cannot be un-
derstood apart from his living presence.
Milford Graves Full Mantis is first and foremost a portrait, but
it’s instructive to consider how it does the retrospective work of
the music documentary. Rather than dabbling in his subject’s
past, Meginsky commits to a single, representative performance.
Watching Graves with dancer Min Tanaka at a Japanese school for
autistic youth, responding to and even propelling the students’ en-
ergy, we get a strong picture of his improvisational gifts. The film’s
end credits grant this piece of footage its own title card, as if it were
itself a performer.
Meginsky’s approach to biography is equally distilled. More
than halfway through, the film’s meditative style is interrupted by
a long story from Graves’ younger days, a Dickensian tale in which
he defends his family and escapes jail by the grace of an improbable
coincidence. The sequence illustrates Graves’ gifts as a storyteller,
certainly, but it also lets history rush into the film’s account, because
of course Graves’ artistic self-reliance was connected to his social
reality as, among other things, a Black father raising children in ’70s
New York City. No cutaways to stock footage of the era’s urban upris-
ings and assassinations are necessary; the story itself carries weight.
What’s so unusual about Milford Graves Full Mantis in the context
46
of the music documentary form is that, in this film, the biographical
element is only one of many ways of telling.
***
Gallery shows on Graves’ work followed Meginsky’s film at ICA
Philadelphia and Artists Space in New York, and an outstanding
catalog recently published by Inventory Press (Milford Graves: A
Mind-Body Deal) presents an even more expansive view. The exhib-
its included online components drawing from Graves’ video archive,
featuring performance documentation, uncategorizable home mov-
ies of basement workshops, as well as an extraordinarily peaceful
clip I can’t get out of my mind, called Movements in the Snow.
For those of us who remember a time before YouTube, it still
defies belief to find this kind of obscure material online. Much of
it is roughing it on untold feeds, but there are attempts to provide
context short of the documentary treatment. The Cultural Equity
YouTube channel, for instance, offers up a vast store of untram-
meled joy deriving from Alan Lomax’s folkloric productions. In his
linear notes for a Mississippi Records compilation of performances
recorded for Lomax’s American Patchwork television series, mu-
sician Nathan Salsburg writes about this material getting a second
life online: “As of this writing, raw footage of performances from
the American Patchwork sessions have generated some 26 million
views and 78,000 subscribers on YouTube…And in this way many
performances have been liberated, so to speak: from decrepit me-
dia, constrictive public television editing, and Lomaxian gloss—if,
given the platform, they are now subject to a much different sort
of commentariat.”
Many of these clips are in the best tradition of documenta-
ry photography. In one, Sheila Kay Adams sings the ballad “Little
Margaret” on a porch, seated between two young girls and an old-
er woman mouthing along to the words. In the space of the shot,
the performance is situated as an intergenerational exchange,
a woman’s lot. The intensity of Adams’ concentration seems to
exert outward pressure on the documentary frame. When she
opens her eyes in the final moments of the clip, her face goes a lit-
tle slack, as if the song had finished with her rather than she with
the song.
These moments after a song can say so much, if we let them. In
The Velvet Underground, Jonathan Richman is particularly reverent
when he recalls the five seconds of stunned silence that would follow
the ear-splitting concerts of the Cale era (“The Velvet Underground
had hypnotized them again!”). Among its many vices, streaming
technology conspires against any such silence, always pushing on
to the next song. Too often the music documentary goes the same
way, making so much small talk that it’s impossible to listen. “Bury
me with music and don’t say a word,” writes Thulani Davis in a bit of
free verse inspired by a Cecil Taylor concert. This demand—or is it
a prayer?—feels a little mischievous, since poetry knows we’re nev-
er done talking about music. Intriguingly, Davis refers to occasion-
al pieces like “C.T. at the Five Spot” as documentaries: the full title
of her recent collection is Nothing But the Music: Documentaries
from Nightclubs, Lofts, Night Clubs and a Tailor’s Shop in Dakar. We
might in turn hope for more music documentaries that could justly
be called poems.
 The Nouba of the Women of Mount Chenoua

On Dangerous Ground
No Master Territories

BY MADELEINE WALL

I understand the irony of quoting Freud here, of all people, but I’m re-
minded of a line from Moses and Monotheism: “There was someone in
darker times who thought the same as you.” At the Haus der Kulturen
der Welt in Berlin last summer, curators and scholars Erika Balsom
and Hila Peleg mounted the expansive multimedia exhibit No Master
Territories: Feminist Worldmaking and the Moving Image—a series
focused on non-fiction filmmaking by women between the ’70s and
’90s—a selection of which travelled to Toronto’s TIFF Cinematheque
this winter. Global in their scope, Balsom and Peleg are deliberate in
their multiplicities, invoking Ella Shohat’s term “plurilogue.” There
is no attempt here at universalizing the experience of women—in-
stead, the largesse of the exhibit (which also includes a publication
from MIT and a museum installation) is diligence in the current
discourse. Here there is no discussion of “lost” or “rediscovered”
works, claims that always centre a white, Western experience.
There is, if anything, a deliberate moving away from concepts like a
“female” or “feminist” gaze, and anyway, these are not films whose
sole concern is responding to more dominant strains of filmmak-
ing. Instead, the focus is on the many ways these filmmakers are
world-making, in a very different way than Hollywood’s syner-
gy-driven cinematic universes. For Balsom and Peleg, this mandate
is best understood by citing the work of Amia Srinivasan, where
world-making is “the transformation of the world through a trans-
formation of our representational practices.” A praxis of filmmak-

47
ing is foregrounded where representation can actually cause change
rather than merely evince a shallow representation that manifests
itself in varied forms.
Byun Young-joo’s 1995 documentary The Murmuring is the first
in a trilogy of the South Korean director’s work made with the resi-
dents of Seoul’s House of Sharing. The six women living there are all
survivors of sexual assault during WWII, when they were enslaved as
“comfort women” for the Japanese army. For up to a year before she
began filming Byun would visit her subjects regularly, and her close
relationship with them is used as a structuring device. She keenly
documents how trauma becomes part of the mundane routine of
their day-to-day lives, imbricated into group activities, and shows
rituals from art therapy to weekly protests at the Japanese embassy
where apologies are explicitly demanded (and withheld). In a series
of interviews with Byun, these elderly women discuss their rapes;
one woman explains how she was so young at the time of her assault
that she had to be cut open by the army surgeon “down there,” un-
able to move past a childish language about her own body. Because
these events were never spoken of, the women simply assumed that
others like them had died; some became infertile, which changed the
course of their lives when it came to marriage and family.
Byun does not hide her presence—there is no anonymity here, and
no attempt at objectivity. She films the women’s naked bodies, wrin-
kled and sagging, because they are evidence of survival. What the film
documents is a shift from private to public discourse, the bravery of
speaking out about a shameful subject. Byun’s subjects believe that
going public with their stories—and with their bodies—is how they
can do the most to change the world, and to prevent what happened
to them from happening again. The filmmaker makes her own role
explicit: she is their collaborator, and the intimacy she’s cultivated is
clear, evident not just in the candour of the interviews but also in the
moments where the women compliment her haircut or invite her to
celebrate New Year’s with them. These scenes suggest that the film
is something more than documentation, but rather something akin
to a radical project of care.
Care also structures Essie Coffey’s My Survival as an Aboriginal
(1979), a documentary about Coffey’s work teaching Aboriginal
knowledge to her children as a means of survival under the regime
of Australian colonialism. She takes children out into the bush to
teach them how to track and live off the land, and warns them of
the lies that they’ll learn in Australian schools. At one point she
introduces her family, many children, nieces, nephews, and oth-
ers whom she takes care of, all coming out of the house one by one.
Within each child is a clear possibility of a new future, and Coffey
works hard—in both the drudgery of her employment as a factory
worker, as well as her work an educator—to make sure this future is
possible. This shorter feature was paired with Tracey Moffatt’s Nice
Coloured Girls (1987), which deals with the long history of Australian
Aboriginal women’s sexual exploitation at the hands of settler sail-
ors. The knowledge that an oppressed group must pass on to sur-
vive has to function within the arena of their oppressor—how to live
off the land when the local government can force you to leave your
ancestral home, or how best to rip off a john when he becomes vio-
lent, are both acts of survival. Neither are tragedies, but rather first-
person documents of continual struggle; they’ve been there long
48
before the white man landed on their shores, and they’ll be there
long after.
The theme of bridging the gap of difference recurs through-
out this series, notably in Claudia von Alemann’s 1981 Blind Spot
(which Balsom wrote about in Cinema Scope 87). Former historian
Elisabeth (Rebecca Pauly) comes to Lyon mid-summer, the town
empty of everyone but the elderly and foreign workers, in search of
traces of the late socialist Flora Tristain. Wandering in a seemingly
aimless fashion, Tristain’s diary in hand, Elisabeth—who has aban-
doned both her family and her discipline, the two realms inherently
linked—looks for Flora through sense experience, recording foot-
steps she may have heard, the chatter of locals in a cafe. Though she
is chastised by a historian who accuses her of relating to Flora so
much that she’s confused her own sensibilities with those of her sub-
ject, Elisabeth well knows who she herself is—her project is seeing
for Flora, not being her. The rote facts of someone’s life, the materi-
als they left behind (in this case, the diary), are only the pale impres-
sions of a fully lived life, one that was full of flesh and breezes. It is
through following this woman long dead that Elisabeth is able to find
herself, for the shadow of a ghost is less constricting than the roles
society has presented to her.
The relationship to another woman through text is also the struc-
turing element of Trinh T. Min-ha’s 1989 classic Surname Viet Given
Name Nam (Trinh’s writing was a key influence on the retrospec-
tive, as well as the source of its title.) Working from a 1983 collec-
tion of interviews with Vietnamese women, Trinh has a series of
Vietnamese-American women narrate the book’s texts, creating a
series of translations—both in terms of medium (in the move from
the written word to enunciation), and of language (from Vietnamese
to French to English). These are gaps Trinh works with (and within),
and the film often presents an abundance of language, written and
spoken: blocks of text onscreen in counterpoint to audible dialogue,
all intercut with news footage and still photography which is then
panned and scanned in search of details. Crucially, there is no sin-
gular authorial voice, and the film’s aims are self-reflexive—within
Trinh’s structure, the performers are given the chance to comment
on both their own testimonies, and on the resonances between their
lives in America and those of the women they are speaking for (and
through), living half a world and a decade away.
The interview appears in many forms in this series, as with the di-
rect address of Kate Millet’s Three Lives (1971), a key text of ’70s fem-
inist realism. Interviewing three women, like the Fates—an elder, a
middle-aged adult, and a youth—Millet draws parallels between
their stories (in particular their relationships with their husbands
and fathers) to create a triple portrait of women whose politiciza-
tion has led them to break away from their station. Another peripa-
tetic author, à la Blind Spot’s Elisabeth, meanders through the last
days of the GDR in After Winter Comes Spring (1989), a documentary
in which director Helke Misselwitz strikes up conversations with
people on trains and gets the measure of their entire lives. From an
elderly couple celebrating their anniversary to teenage girls teasing
their hair in the mirror, Misselwitz employs glimpses of the every-
day to create a mosaic of life in the GDR.
Within the films in the series there is a common concern that the
promises of revolution—political, social, or intellectual—do not ex-

tend to all of its subjects. Commissioned and then censored by the
Castro-established Federación de Mujeres Cubanas (Federation of
Cuban Women), Sara Gomez’s 1969 short Mi Aporte intercuts inter-
views with factory workers speaking about their experiences with
TV interviews of men speaking about the women workers during
the consolidation of the Cuban Revolution. Gomez’s subjects, pre-
dominantly Afro-Cuban women, talk about the difficulties of balanc-
ing family and work, and the burden placed on them to maintain it;
and, although the difference between what these women say about
themselves and what is said about them is untenable, they persevere
regardless. Although she died prematurely at the age of 31, Gomez
created a radical and robust body of work, and is one of many film-
makers in this series whose oeuvre was cut lamentably short.
The Nouba of the Women of Mount Chenoua (1979), one of only
two films made by Algerian author Assia Djebar, braids fiction and
ethnographic documentary in its account of Lila (Zohra Sahraoui),
who returns to her village in the mountains of Chenoua with her
family 15 years after they were forced to flee due to the Algerian
War. Seeking to come to terms with the conflict that shaped her
childhood, Lila/Sahraoui conducts interviews with real local women
about their efforts in the cause of anti-colonial resistance, and the
importance of conveying that heritage to their children. Far from any
kind of postmodernist distancing, Djebar’s use of a fictional framing
for this documentary material instead accentuates the importance
of passing on knowledge, in whatever form. For these old women,
who created their own worlds in the darkness of caves as they hid
from French bombing during the height of the conflict, caring for the
The Murmuring
young involves teaching them this lived history of resistance, their
music echoing through the scarred mountains.
The divide between fiction and documentary is made explicit
in Lizzie Borden’s Regrouping (1976), a work that takes apart and
discusses its own self in the process of being made. In the opening
intertitle, Borden admits that though she was initially seeking col-
laboration with her subjects in her attempt to document a women’s
collective, she ultimately ended up needing to take control when the
group took issue with her, her camera, and her gaze. Footage of do-
mestic scenes of the collective—the women in the kitchen, their na-
ked bodies in the shared shower, Borden catching her own reflection
in a mirror—is accompanied by the voiceovers of five of its members
discussing the failures of the film, their issues with it, and the col-
lapse of their community.
Through this polyphonic abundance of perspectives, Borden
crafts an elegy for a failed utopia that foregoes mourning in favour of
a resolute looking forward. Recently restored by the Anthology Film
Archive, Regrouping returns at a moment in which argument is key,
where the many failures of feminism’s past need to be made explicit
in order to move ahead. As with so many of the other films in this
retrospective, Borden finds in the private lives of women a constant
working towards something new, a secret, ongoing revolution that
is never static. Regrouping ends abruptly, with one woman saying
“I don’t agree” before being cut off. This isn’t to interrupt her, but
rather to acknowledge that her (unheard) disagreement is one of the
multitude of refusals that will create a viable future. What else needs
to be said?
49
Festivals: Berlin

Lois Patiño’s Samsara

BY LAWRENCE GARCIA

In the modern cinema, the imageless screen assumed a new, decisive

importance. No longer there as mere punctuation, or used to simply
mark a change of scene, the interstice took on an independent val-
ue of its own. To essay its new status, one might contrast the strictly
functional stitch points of Alfred Hitchcock’s Rope (1948) with the
transitions of Stan Brakhage’s Reflections on Black (1955), where the
interstice between images—the pure black or white screen—serves
a reflexive, properly structural value. In the latter, we are no longer
dealing with linkages of associated images, but relinkages of inde-
pendent images across a yawning void. Robert Bresson’s Notes on
the Cinematograph, with its emphasis on “what happens in the junc-
tures,” on the joins and ellipses through which poetry “penetrates
unaided,” exemplifies this new understanding, and its principles
have been carried forward by artists like Jean-Claude Rousseau
and Angela Schanelec. The newfound significance of the imageless
screen extends, of course, far beyond Bresson—even to such unlikely

50
places as Alexandre Koberidze’s What Do We See When We Look at
the Sky? (2021), where, for a few seconds, we are asked to close our
eyes and assimilate an imageless void into the film itself.
It is with this background in mind that we should consider the
achievement of Samsara, Galician filmmaker Lois Patiño’s third fea-
ture. The film opens in Laos, near a Buddhist temple, where a village
boy, Amid (Amid Keomany), spends part of his days reading a book of
Buddhist scriptures to Mon (Simone Milavanh), a dying old woman.
Filmed by Mauro Herce in 16mm, this section of Samsara mixes stiff
amateur performances, dreamlike superimpositions, and incantato-
ry line readings. If it is none too convincing as an ethnographic foray,
that’s because it mainly serves as a pretext for what follows. When
Mon dies, we are informed that her spirit will now travel through the
Bardo (“The Intermediate Reality”), which she will, “thanks to the
book,” know how to guide herself through. Onscreen text instructs
us to close our eyes; only when the silence comes are we to open
them again. We are told that it will be “a long journey,” and, for as
long as this passage lasts, we are asked to make the inside of our eye-
lids a part of the film itself.
For a while we see only darkness, accompanied by an ominous
ringing, as ambient tropical noises slowly build on the soundtrack.
A flash of light intrudes, almost blinding after the inky darkness.
Another follows soon after. The sounds intensify, as fields of colour
fill one’s vision, forming intricate, radially symmetric, often two-
toned patterns. (If you open your eyes during this section, which I
mostly resisted doing on first viewing, you will see intense blocks of
colour radiating from and fading back into the centre of the screen,
framed by bright fringes of a different hue.) Increasingly rapid flash-
es of light timed to percussive, gong-like noises soon follow, until the
screen goes fully black once more and the crashing of waves finally
gives way to the sound of silence.
This 15-minute section of Samsara—which, not to put too fine a
point on it, is the film’s raison d’être—links up with two important
experimental film traditions. The first is that of Gene Youngblood’s
“expanded cinema,” expounded in his classic text of the same name,
which in its widest meaning designates “an attempt to approximate
mind forms.” Patiño takes inspiration from the Bardo Thodol, the
so-called Tibetan Book of the Dead, and the reference connects
Samsara to many of the works Youngblood discusses: not just the
“cosmic cinema” of Jordan Belson, whose Re-Entry (1964) draws
directly from the concept of the Bardo, but also the psychedelic,
computer-generated forms of James Whitney’s Lapis (1966), which
are more generally inspired by Eastern mysticism and Jungian psy-
chology. Gaspar Noé’s Enter the Void (2009), an extended, Bardo-
inspired point-of-view shot stretching from life into death, does
not fit neatly into the expanded-cinema tradition, but nonetheless
recalls it in its quest for spectacular imagery commensurate to the
forms of the mind. With Samsara, Patiño suggests that this quest
may be best fulfilled by turning inward—that negation may be the
surest route to expansion.
The second experimental tradition Samsara relates to is that of
the flicker film. Earlier, I said that in the modern cinema the inter-
stice between images became just as, if not more, important than
their visual association, as per Bresson’s dictum that “the insensi-
ble bond connecting your images which are furthest apart and most
different is your vision.” The flicker-film tradition effectively literal-
izes this injunction, with its practitioners composing entire works
out of these “insensible bonds.” In Peter Kubelka’s Arnulf Rainer
(1960) and Tony Conrad’s The Flicker (1966), the interstices—the
pure black-and-white frames—are the entire film, having in effect
absorbed all other images into a pulsing, imageless screen. With
Samsara Patiño goes one step further in this direction, proposing
that, if images are relinked only by virtue of being projected onto the
same screen, which allows for contact independent of distance, then
cannot the spectator’s body be used for the same purpose?
Samsara’s originality, then, lies in fusing the psychedelic, man-
dala-like forms of Belson and Whitney with an ingenious develop-
ment of the flicker film. To represent the Bardo state, Patiño does
not just orchestrate spectacular encounters with light and motion,
but also locates the interstice, the site of relinkage, on the inside of
our eyelids. In previous films like Night Without Distance (2015) and
Red Moon Tide (2020), Patiño has consistently proven himself to be
an artist with no shortage of compelling ideas, and with Samsara he
has realized yet another. The film’s technical merits are admitted-
ly more difficult to evaluate, as Patiño effectively sidesteps any di-
rect comparisons one might make to previous flicker films or their
variants. It is difficult to say how Samsara’s convulsive, haptic play
measures up to, say, that of Paul Sharits, or of Rainer Kohlberger’s
recent Answering the Sun (2022), but there’s something to be said for
sheer conceptual audacity. One way of answering the sun, after all, is
to simply close one’s eyes.
On the basis of Patiño’s chosen reference points—the film’s title
refers to a Buddhist concept of rebirth—Samsara’s 15-minute coup
de cinéma is intended to plunge us in a kind of world-memory, a cos-
mic consciousness. The operative notion is that of karmic cycles, the
coexistence of all things from all times. But one need not be a mystic
to accept that in Samsara, with its novel use of the interstice, suc-
cession becomes less important than simultaneity. Indeed, the main
consequence of Patiño’s reflections on black is that we become con-
cerned less with a before and after within time, than with a coexist-
ence of relations across it.
The significance of this shift shows up when, following the Bardo
passage, Samsara surfaces on the shores of Zanzibar in Tanzania,
where a young girl (Juwairiya Idrisa Uwesu) wakes up to learn that
their family goat has given birth. The girl wanders around aimlessly,
the newborn kid in tow. The women of her village harvest seaweed
used to produce soap. At one point, someone picks up a red star-
fish, the very animal that Mon, the dying woman we saw earlier, had
wanted to be reincarnated as. Shot by Jessica Sarah Rinland, this
final section recalls the cycles of metempsychosis in Michelangelo
Frammartino’s Le Quattro Volte (2010), though it is less interesting
in and of itself than for how it relinks with the first, Laos-set section
across a yawning void. We know where we have arrived, but whether
ten seconds, ten minutes, or ten years have elapsed, we cannot say;
indeed, we cannot definitively say that this section takes place af-
ter the first. Samsara thus leaves us with two independent worlds,
co-existent yet irreducible, co-present yet incompossible, connect-
ed only by an imageless screen—a night without distance.
51
Festivals: Berlin

There’s a violence inherent in modern medicine—not just in the

Claire physical intrusions that take place during a surgical procedure, but
in the language of medicine itself. Foucault wrote of the “medical
gaze,” a way of looking at the patient’s body through the lens of sci-
entific knowledge, interpreting its visible symptoms and signs using

Simon’s pre-cut terminology and systems of classification. Under this gaze,

the body is denuded of personhood, its individual mysteries razed
for the greater good; when maladies arise, one can only hope that the

Notre corps
doctor has seen it all before, can identify the problem, and relate it to
an established index of ailments and remedies.
Claire Simon’s Notre corps—which captures the visitations and
procedures in the gynecological ward of Paris’s Tenon hospital, a
BY BEATRICE LOAYZA public institution located a few blocks from Père Lachaise—under-
stands this compromise, but offers a rebuttal as well: it honours the
body’s possibilities and delicate particularities by expanding that
gaze to encompass the lives beyond the bodies, the unique frictions
engendered by supposedly objective methods. Simon’s work as a
writer, director, and cinematographer of both narrative films and
documentaries is rooted in the “direct cinema” teachings of the
Ateliers Varan, a documentary training program founded by Jean
Rouch, and her new film—which premiered in the Berlinale’s Forum
section—unfolds with the same chat-heavy, observational approach
of her previous documentaries, including Le concours (2016), a
Wiseman-like study of the admissions process to France’s top film
school, La Fémis; and Premières solitudes (2018), which is made up
almost entirely of conversations between groups of teenagers.
Notre corps begins in Père Lachaise, with Simon’s handheld
camera pointed down at her feet as she strolls through the ceme-
tery’s chunky cobblestone pathways, describing the nature of what
will follow. Inspired by her producer, who had encouraged Simon
to see for herself the “mostly female world” within this particular
hospital unit, she soon encounters life, death, and everything in
between—“maternity, cancer, endometriosis, gender transitioning,
etc. All the gynecological pathologies that weigh down our lives,
loves, hopes, and desires.” Simon and her camera proceed to sit in on
consultations and bedside chats between patients and nurses, luxu-
riating in each person’s story, which accounts for the film’s lengthy,
nearly three-hour runtime. The film progresses, roughly linearly,
through the sundry stages of life: an adolescent girl, her back turned
to the camera, explains the events that led up to her pregnancy and
need for an abortion; couples of distinct age brackets and ethnicities
detail the routines of their sex lives as they pursue in-vitro fertiliza-
tion; trans men and women contend with the hormonal changes that
occur naturally throughout life.
Despite this personalization of every case, the “medical gaze”
nevertheless looms large in the film, with many discussions between
patient and doctor producing a flurry of estranging terminology
(urethra, oocytes, vascular degeneration) that, through the lens of
Simon’s attentive camera, underscores the disparities of power be-
tween the body experts, so to speak, and the bodies themselves. It’s
no unfamiliar thing for a doctor to explain what’s happening inside
you, or to otherwise interpret what you confess to feeling in more
concrete terms. But presented thus, with this dynamic repeated
across a spectrum of afflictions and treatments, the patient’s vulner-

52
ability feels more pronounced, or, at the very least, their vulnerabil-
ity appears to be the unfortunate standard. A brief sequence toward
the end of the film makes this explicit, when a group of women activ-
ists, survivors of medical abuse, are shown railing against the profes-
sion’s authoritarian tendencies. At the same time, these women as a
collective—all tangled in a web of biological complexities, all dealing,
essentially, in the care and maintenance of bodily parts that can be
altered, that wither, and that change with time—challenge the lame
precepts of biological essentialism. It’s not just trans bodies that are
fluid: the very nature of bodily particularity, with its unique forms
of growing and degenerating, suggests that this quality is intrinsic
to all bodies.
Simon also turns her camera on modern medicine’s advanced
instruments of seeing, the robots and nano-cameras capable of ren-
dering visible the tiniest corners of the human body. In one scene, we
witness a surgery up close from the startlingly visceral perspective
of a camera nestled inside someone’s womb. However, this sequence
is unlike the bodily spectacle of Véréna Paravel and Lucien Castaing-
Taylor’s De Humani Corporis Fabrica (2022), whose use of tiny cam-
eras to explore and defamiliarize the crevices of the human body
aims toward little more than an impressive display of effects. Here,
the objectifying impulses of medical practice and its technologies
are countered by the intimacy of Simon’s camera, the way it lingers
on the patients’ responses, their voices, and the expression in their
eyes, heightened by their COVID-era masks.
Simon’s work has previously hinged on the power of personal nar-
rative, with her subjects revealing themselves by their own move-
ments and in their own words. Premières solitudes relies on its teen-
age subjects to speak for themselves, while in Mimi (2003), Simon’s
friend Mimi Chiola recounts the story of her life—including her
confrontations with Nazi violence and her struggles with her sexual
identity—at times speaking directly to the camera. This approach re-
calls the long tradition of feminist filmmaking stretching back to the
radical collectives of the ’70s, in which women’s narration functions
as the creative principle itself. In Notre corps, this same emphasis
on speaking allows the patients to reclaim a subjectivity otherwise
flattened by the mechanisms of clinical expertise. One woman, for
instance, relates the pain she feels during intercourse, eventually
confessing to the existential crisis it seems to pose to her marriage—
mere months after her wedding, she is incapable of having sex with
the love of her life. An older woman refuses to quit smoking, and is
almost indignant when she admits to going through a pack and a half
a day—it’s her only pleasure in life, she says.
Midway through shooting Notre corps, Simon herself became a
patient at Tenon, inadvertently fracturing the neutrality of her cam-
era. Here, not only does she enter the frame as the filmmaker, but
also captures herself in the vulnerability of patienthood, filming her
own consultation with a doctor who informs her that she has breast
cancer. In a later scene, she is naked before the camera as a nurse
examines her breasts. She admits that, had she learned of her diag-
nosis before starting the film, the bad news would be more difficult
to process. In The Body in Pain, Elaine Scarry writes of our inability
to communicate physical pain with any kind of precision: it resists
language, in part because each body reacts to injury in different, im-
perceptible manners. It makes sense, then, that Simon would feel
comforted by what she has seen. She cannot know the pain of oth-
ers, and yet there is strength to be found in the body’s—our bodies’—
shared unknowability.
53
Festivals: Sundance
All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt
A Few Signs of Life
BY ROBERT KOEHLER
The 2023 edition of the Sundance Film Festival wasn’t the worst
ever—that would be 2021, when the lousiest movie in the history of
major festival-winners, that thing titled Coda, somehow won every
prize in sight and never stopped. That annus horribilis also marked
the year that Sundance went online (because of you-know-what),
and it is now clear that the festival will never be the same again. The
latest edition, though not the worst, was certainly the strangest, pre-
senting a hybrid of online and in-person programming, and it was
up to you to choose which one (or both) you fancied. I chose a blend
of each, partly for efficiency and partly out of a simple desire to re-
turn to a live festival with human beings sitting in cinemas. Having
deliberately avoided the general insanity of the opening weekend in
Park City, I arrived just in time to learn that the expected mob scene
never happened, and to discover a ski resort far more populated by
skiers than festivalgoers. Main Street, usually the teeming hub of life
during Sundance, was semi-deserted, and it became quickly obvious
that most attendees had opted for their laptops and living-room so-
fas. I’ve never attended a festival of this scale with so little energy or
so few bodies, rendering the event aspect of Sundance rather absurd.
This did, though, have the salutary effect of allowing me to get into
just about any screening I wished, which meant being able to watch
many more movies than expected, albeit in cinemas half-full (or less).
54
It also meant that, as in the case of the audience watching Deborah
Stratman’s rich, multi-levelled Last Things, that they really wanted
to be there—and Last Things demands, if nothing else, a committed
audience. Against a mesmerizing montage of images capturing geo-
logical phenomena (particularly crystals and their dynamic growth
processes), Stratman constructs a densely layered soundtrack com-
prising texts spoken in French (by filmmaker Valérie Massadian)
along with commentary by Lawrence University professor of ge-
ology and environmental studies Dr. Marcia Bjornerud, the whole
mixing science fiction, speculative narrative and lucid science that
explains how the essence of all life on Earth can be traced to min-
erals interacting with water on the surface. Stratman’s film conveys
aspects of both doom and hope: doom for a human race apparently
hell-bent on self-destruction (the term “climate change” is never
uttered, nor does it need to be), and hope for the Earth’s own evolu-
tion—an evolution that may not include homo sapiens in the picture,
and where rocks and crystals may again rule as they once did.
Stratman’s astounding work was part of Sundance’s revived New
Frontier section, coinciding with Kim Yutani’s first year as director
of programming. Yutani clearly saw, as some of us did, that the elim-
ination of any experimental cinema from New Frontier last year was
stupid—and even better, she did away with the festival’s even stupid-
 Passages
er obsession with VR, which had turned into a kind of techno-fetish.
(Additionally, Yutani wisely reduced the number of films in most
sections and eliminated multiple Park City venues.) A grand total
of three experimental films were shown in New Frontier (mean-
ing the program remains a serious laggard on the North American
front, behind TIFF’s incredibly shrinking Wavelengths), the oth-
er good one along with Last Things being Mary Helena Clark and
Mike Gibisser’s fascinating A Common Sequence, which explores in
pleasantly oblique fashion the merging of scientific, economic, and
political dilemmas surrounding the commodification of genetic
material for patents and future commercial applications. In one in-
genious example, the filmmakers consider the history and traditions
around the achoque salamander of Mexico, which is highly valued by
Indigenous fisherman on Lake Pátzcuaro, and the medical and com-
mercial potentials derived from the salamander’s unique ability to
regrow its body parts. Clark and Gibisser land on one of the tough-
est critiques of capital in recent cinema, and the art of A Common
Sequence is that even the most observant viewer wouldn’t see
it coming.
Sundance’s Premieres section is typically negligible, yet some-
how this year’s selection included two of the best narrative works
in the lineup. Ira Sachs has never made anything at the level of his
new film, Passages, but then again he’s never worked with Franz
Rogowski. If there’s an actor on fire right now, it’s Rogowski, who
makes anything he’s in more interesting, and, in this case, ex-
tremely funny. He plays Tomas, a self-involved German film direc-
tor working in Paris and living with his husband Martin, a British
graphic designer (played by the impressive Ben Whishaw), who
falls hard for a woman named Agathe (Adèle Exarchopoulos). The
ensuing love triangle, which sees Tomas jumping in and out of beds
like a man possessed, is a roundelay of comic-tragic desire that
Ophüls (and, probably, Truffaut) would have admired. It’s hard to
recall a previous case of two likely unprecedented things occur-
ring in the same movie: two mainstream male actors who are stars
in their respective countries (Rogowski in Germany, Whishaw in
the UK) having a lengthy, lusty sex scene with each other; and an
A Common Sequence
American indie filmmaker so easily adapting to French filmmaking
style and practice.
The other Premieres standout was also a comedic farce centring
on a screwed-up filmmaker: Rotting in the Sun, an unexpectedly good
movie from the typically terrible Sebastián Silva. Morose about his
work, the protagonist (played by Silva himself ) has been trying to kill
himself by dosing on mass quantities of ketamine. A chance encounter
with a pushy, gay social influencer (the nebbish-y Jonathan Firstman)
leads to a reluctant collaboration, and the ensuing murder mystery
becomes a (gay) farce for the mobile device age. The film also sees the
Chilean-born Silva offering a sly take on Mexico City at its most con-
temporary (American expats appear to have taken over the place), and
it has a terrific ace-in-the-hole: the brilliant Catalina Saavedra, who
effectively revives the title character she played in Silva’s second fea-
ture, The Maid (2009), only much funnier and lethal.
While advancing the mission of recapturing silent cinema’s ca-
pacity for a poetics of emotion and ideas may not be a primary pro-
ject at Sundance, it was fascinating to discover among this year’s
selection certain films that aggressively embraced such a task—and
the two most remarkable works did this with a degree of command-
ing triumph, grace, and power rare at even the most adventurous
festivals. Given that Sundance tends to program in such a blink-
ered, backwards fashion, was it purely an accident that the
astonishing All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt—Raven Jackson’s feature
debut, following a few shorts that are viewable on the Criterion
Channel (including the 2018 Nettles)—found its way into the usually
dull US dramatic section? The film was such an outlier in the pro-
gram that it certainly seemed that way. How could a virtually non-
narrative reverie on the life of a young woman in the Delta
country of Mississippi from the ’70s to the ’90s, rendered with no
clear chronology, no conventional “dramatic” scenes, no direct
exposition and no established “character arcs”—all of those basic
building blocks that the Sundance Institute drills into its students—
get into the festival’s central showcase?
However it happened, here it was, and All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt
made a profound statement, suggesting an entirely new pathway
55
 Smoke Sauna Sisterhood
for American filmmaking in general. That it was made by a young
Black woman trained primarily in writing and poetry seemed to
prove a fundamental point: that if US cinema is to escape the cre-
ative doldrums in which it’s currently stuck, it will need the help
of artists who come to filmmaking with a fresh sensibility, unham-
pered by old ideas and notions. In the impressionist view of the
various stages of childhood and young adulthood of her protago-
nist, Mackenzie (known throughout as “Mack”), Jackson captures a
universe of non-verbal gestures, communications, and connections
that consistently (and deliberately) transcend words. (Notably, she
excised most of her written and performed dialogue in the final edit
she created with Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s longtime editor, Lee
Chatametikool.) Over the course of the film’s progression, Mack
grows from a child who tragically loses her mother (Sheila Atim) to
a woman living amidst an extended family, including father Isaiah
(Chris Chalk) and sister Josie (Moses Ingram plays her as an adult),
as well as a larger local community in the lush Delta country, which
is so vivid, physical and tactile—down to the soil of the title, which
the women of the region traditionally taste to get a sense of what to
grow—that it becomes a primary character.
Mack’s development is traced in a non-linear fashion, following
poetry’s capacity for backward and forward motion and memory.
The film is concerned not with a direct line of growth, but with asso-
ciations and remembered affections—seldom do films linger so long
on hands touching other hands, bodies in embrace, faces touching
each other, the sound of crickets in the distance, water gurgling, an
openness to every sense receiving the world. Put another way, we’ve
seldom encountered an American film influenced equally by the
totemic poetics of Julie Dash’s Daughters of the Dust (1991) and the
Soviet-era cinema of Andrei Tarkovsky and Elem Klimov, and then
delivering an entirely fresh and new expression. All Dirt Roads Taste
of Salt, which was denied a single prize by the bad jury (comprised
of playwright Jeremy O. Harris, filmmaker Eliza Hittman, and actor
Marlee Matlin), is a breakthrough—to what, only time will tell.
Though it was the deserving winner of the World Documentary
directing award, Anna Hints’ glorious, overwhelming masterpiece
Smoke Sauna Sisterhood is just as much of a Sundance outlier as
56
Passages
Jackson’s film—a work of observational cinema in a festival that pre-
fers its documentaries to tell the audience how and what to think.
Sundance is a power centre in the filmmaking world for instruction-
al non-fiction, the kind of message-driven, topical work that typical-
ly ends up on HBO and other high-end cable or streaming platforms.
Hints’ sensibility is entirely different, and in some ways notably close
to Jackson’s. While her subject is a world away from the Mississippi
Delta—a traditional smoke sauna run by and for women, deep in a
forest in southern Estonia—she also has a great concern for the po-
etics of image and sound intermingling and yielding fresh sensations
and feelings, and exhibits a great trust in the viewer’s willingness to
totally immerse themselves in the moment in order to reach ecstatic
heights of discovery.
This is fundamental, since Smoke Sauna Sisterhood captures a
profound sense of the ecstatic, which is achieved by these women
in moments of genuine togetherness and connection. This expe-
rience nearly defies description, as Hints (aided by the incredible
cinematography of Ants Tammik) gently observes the smoke sau-
na “sisters” as they commune together in a wooded hut managed
and hosted four seasons of the year by Kadi Kivilo (the only wom-
an, other than folk accordionist Kaarin Parts, whose face is shown
onscreen). As the women allow their bodies to absorb the sauna’s
powerful brew of heat and moisture, they speak of their painful pasts
in anecdotes that are uncensored, amusing, and sometimes deeply
disturbing—monologues that cover a vast spectrum of women’s ex-
periences, from rape, cancer, and hatred of one’s own body to absurd
family encounters, bitter alienations from parents, and backwards
and sexist societal biases.
It is precisely by not focusing on faces, but rather on bodies—how
the rays of sunlight and lingering smoke form sculptural shapes
around the flesh, how the flesh itself is a container of so much life,
love and pain—that Hints is able to make the extraordinarily cine-
matic leap to understanding how pain may be released from the body
itself. By the time that these women begin to chant, “We sweat out
all the pain! We sweat out all the fear!” they are no longer vulnerable
in their own skin, but a team of warriors, engaging the viewer in a
genuinely transcendent experience.

The Self in Shards
Ian Penman’s Fassbinder: Thousands of Mirrors
BY ERIKA BALSOM
“The night he died I was in a north London nightclub, where I took
heroin for the first time. I returned to my south London flat the next
morning, threw up, and went straight in to work, where someone
immediately told me about his death.” This fragment, the 421st of
the 450 that comprise Ian Penman’s engaging new book Fassbinder:
Thousands of Mirrors, strikes me as something much more than
a “where were you when…” sort of anecdote. It cuts to the core.
Arriving late in the game with a stinging force, it sutures together two
unrelated events in 1982: an opioid turn in the writer’s early twen-
ties, and the drugged-out expiration of his subject at age 37. Across
the book, Penman leans hard on Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s last
days, as if the director’s death and the way of life that led to it exerted
an abyssal pull on him. Penman seems driven by a biographical fas-
cination with the decadent intensity of the enfant terrible from Bad
Wörishofen—or is it an autobiographical fascination? As Fassbinder
winds down, the parallel tracks established from the start—the life of
the writer, the life of the filmmaker—collide in an intoxicated night
Books
Veronika Voss
during which one era gives way to another. For the young Penman,
Fassbinder was a role model, a “post-punk ideal,” “wildly glamorous
and deeply scuzzy”; retrospectively, he appears as a bridge between
the revolutionary ’60s and the sick ’80s.
Calling the book Fassbinder makes it sound like a monograph-
ic study, when in fact the true nature of the undertaking is better
discerned from its subtitle and opening epigraph. Like Fassbinder
before him, Penman borrows from Vladimir Nabokov: “For I do
not exist: there exist but thousands of mirrors that reflect me. With
every acquaintance I make, the population of phantoms reflecting
me increases.” In the proliferating mirrors of this compendium of
numbered fragments, we surely get glimpses of Fassbinder and his
cinema, a cinema in which, to borrow Thomas Elsaesser’s memora-
ble formulation, “to be is to be perceived.” But above all, what comes
into view is a portrait of the English author as refracted through the
life and death of the German director, and many other continental
spectres besides. Janet Malcolm suggests that, “If an autobiography
57

is to be even minimally readable, the autobiographer must step in
and subdue memory’s autism, its passion for the tedious.” Penman
most definitely steps in, supported by a chorus of phantoms.
Criticism is a parasitical practice—it must feed off a host to come
into being. This does not mean it is an impersonal affair. Some leave
no trace, but the best critics are always indelibly there, even when
they make no mention of their own lives. Penman tips this balance
to the far side, taking criticism to the threshold of memoir, drawing
in what he needs to go where he wants to go. Rather than working
through Fassbinder’s filmography in detail, the book draws on an
immense range of cultural references across disciplines to piece
together an account of one person’s experience of “back then.” It
vibrates with the excitement and seduction of youthful subcultural
discovery; it trembles with the queasy sense that a new and different
darkness was on the verge of setting in. Penman says that Fassbinder
might be his “own equivalent of what Baudelaire was for Walter
Benjamin”—an artistic figure from the past, positioned on the cusp
of a major epochal shift. What he does not mention is something
equally important: as with Benjamin’s Baudelaire, here the artist
becomes a medium. Fassbinder is a substance passed through to get
somewhere else. He is also a way of summoning ghosts.
Penman is best known as a music critic who began sprinkling ref-
erences to French theory into NME in 1977. When his first collec-
tion, Vital Signs: Music, Movies, and Other Manias, came out in 1998,
Iain Sinclair called him “non-eminent (but legendary),” underlin-
ing the writer’s antipathy to journalistic convention and sketching
his drift away from the establishment, into his “wilderness years.”
These days, this anti-hack contributes essays to the London Reviews
of Books on figures like Prince and Elvis, and is “the most drug-free
[he has] been since the late 1970s,” without even a cigarette in nine
months. Illicit substances are not the only things to have a decreased
presence in Penman’s life today: the cinema, too, is a relic. If movies
ever were his beat, they aren’t anymore. Rather than seeing Veronika
Voss (one of his favourites, and mine too) four times in its opening
week as he did in 1982, he now binges crime series on Netflix in-
58
The Third Generation
stead, shifting not only exhibition context but preferred content
as well.
This is all to say that Fassbinder: Thousands of Mirrors is in mul-
tiple respects written from the other side of a divide, as the author
looks back at his own life, at all that he has left behind and is no
longer. To recall and revise a notion of Jean-Louis Schefer’s, at is-
sue here are the films that watched over Penman’s young adulthood.
Serge Daney unfolds Schefer’s idea with typical brilliance: “It is one
thing to learn to watch movies as a ‘professional’—only to verify that
movies concern us less and less—but it is another to live with those
movies that watched us grow and that have seen us, early hostages of
our future biographies, already entangled in the snare of our histo-
ry.” Penman is a celebrated writer who has sometimes been paid to
write about cinema, but he is no professional, has never wanted to be
one. He is an autodidact who holds that kind of training in disdain, as
something that blunts sensibility. He does not hide his contempt for
academics, even as he cites Derrida’s Glas; he remains caught in the
idiosyncratic trap of passion, in the snare of his own history.
As a result, a time-capsule feeling takes hold. One casualty of this
is that cinema appears as a mummified entity: there is no engage-
ment here with filmmaking as a living tradition, or with any of the di-
rectors who might claim to carry forth something of the Fassbinder
approach today, whether consciously or not. (To name only a few:
Albert Serra, with his chosen family of performers, returning again
and again in changing configurations to realize the master’s vision;
François Ozon and Todd Haynes, with their queering of melodra-
ma; or even Hong Sangsoo, with his tireless production of “minor”
works.) Penman goes so far as to suggest that Fassbinder himself has
been somewhat forgotten in our time of streaming content, asking,
“Why hasn’t he been curated and archived and appropriated and
name-dropped to death?” (My immediate thought: hasn’t he? I sup-
pose it all depends on where one stands.)
But to complain about the lack of a more cine-centric approach
here is to miss the point. There are plenty of other writers who im-
merse themselves in contemporary filmmaking, and plenty of places
to go for more conventional accounts of Fassbinder. Gossipy exposé,
rigorous historicization, close reading, an account of his legacy and
influence—take your pick, they all exist. Penman walks a different
path, one that only he could.
To complete Fassbinder: Thousands of Mirrors, his first original
book, Penman mimicked the industriousness of his ostensible sub-
ject, writing quickly enough to finish in just over three months. He
breaks up his text into numbered entries that are sometimes barely
a sentence long, and rarely more than a page. This bricolage includes
quotations presented without commentary (from figures such as
Jean Genet and Klaus Theweleit, as well as critics on Fassbinder and
the director himself ); recollections of the author’s life, from child-
hood on; some rehearsal of RWF lore; zoomed-out commentary on
selected films; and various excurses on related issues. Penman pre-
fers to name and cite rather than explain, evincing a special predi-
lection for staccato lists and rapid-fire declarations. The following
is not anomalous: “Mood: hard drugs, terror tactics, need-to-know
secrecy, the ever-present threat of horrific violence, surveillance
tapes, VHS porno, Maoist play acting, and ‘radical’ as a self-righteous
identifier of choice.” One entry reads simply, “Gerhard Richter’s 48
Portraits (1971/72).” Interrogative statements pile up. Penman’s tel-
egraphic style is poised somewhere between casual brainstorming
and chiselled exactitude, provisional speculation and world-weary
assuredness.
The author’s working method might be part of what generated
this form, and perhaps also goes somewhat toward explaining the
primacy the book accords to atmosphere, its tendency to digress and
to traffic in associations, and the absence of in-depth sequence anal-
ysis. But this could also just be Penman’s M.O. more generally, in- Zona: A Book about a Film about a Journey to a Room. Here, we move
dicative of aptitudes honed through his short-form pieces about pop beyond the confines of conventional film criticism into a cluster of
stars and pop music. He has a formidable skill for getting the con- genre-bending books written by individuals not primarily associat-
tours of a larger-than-life persona and the feeling of a zeitgeist down ed with cinema, and often with a strong stake in memoir—a bibliog-
on the page, both of which are more closely associated with music raphy that Fassbinder now joins.
writing than with the textual dissection that grounds most film crit- “Literary cinephilia.” Is there another art form for which a com-
icism. If I have made scarce comment thus far on what Penman ac- parable critical phenomenon exists? Where so many celebrated
tually says about Fassbinder or his films, it is because what is most tomes, so much of the best writing, comes from people whose real
compelling about this book (and it is indeed compelling) are not its intellectual home (if such a thing can be said to exist) lies elsewhere?
precise insights into the director’s oeuvre or persona, many of which My impulse is to say no. What does this tell us about film? Perhaps
are familiar enough—it is the author’s positioning of these within a something inspiring. Cinema speaks to us about our lives and our
much wider, unflaggingly personal constellation of obsessions and existence; it overflows the silos of expertise to produce sophisticated
experiences, all delivered in distinctively styled prose. and compelling responses from non-specialists who unravel its con-
If one wanted to rebut Penman’s claim that Fassbinder has both nections to lived experience, politics, culture. It shapes even those
“thank Christ…escaped being turned into a monument” and “been who do not organize their lives around it in ways that demand an ac-
so dishonoured by not being turned into a monument,” one would count; it is, as Daney said, a relation to the world.
have to look no further than the immense dossier on the director But what might the phenomenon tell us about film criticism?
published in the May 2017 issue of Sight & Sound. RWF is there on Perhaps something not so nice. What gets happily left behind in
the cover, leather-clad, cigarette in hand, on the occasion of a two- these books is not only all that “professional” movie-watching—the
month retrospective at the British Film Institute. Funnily enough, pedantry and obfuscation of some academic writing, the superfi-
the article inside most germane to Penman’s Fassbinder is not any cial, PR-beholden banality of much new-release reviewing and fes-
of the many concerning the director of The Third Generation (1979, tival reporting. They also dispense with the hermetic enclosures
another one of Penman’s favourites, a poster of which hangs in my that pervade film criticism, even (or especially) in its more serious
office)—rather, it is Adrian Martin’s “What is Literary Cinephilia?” guises. They break with the pervasive tendency to discuss movies
a text charting a wide category characterized by “an equal exchange principally in relation to other movies. There are many writers who
between literature and cinema,” one vein of which includes titles are incapable of mentally exiting the cinema, even when the air gets
such as Nathalie Léger’s Suite for Barbara Loden and Geoff Dyer’s impossibly stuffy. That hall of mirrors is one Penman never enters.

59
imagesfestival.com

60

Digital Releases I Don’t Want
& a Few Others That I Do
Who could it be at Vinegar Syndrome Films
in the US and/or Powerhouse Films in the UK
who decided I was an aficionado of Mexican
and/or Canadian wrestling? I haven’t been
able to discover if Vinegar Syndrome and
Powerhouse are distantly or closely related
to one another—or if, on the contrary, sepa-
rate publicists at each company arrived inde-
pendently at the notion that I was an actual or
potential wrestling buff. But the fact remains
that unrequested check discs of Santo vs. Evil
Brain and Santo vs. Infernal Men (both 1961),
along with two more unrequested check discs
devoted to an Italian Western with an equal-
ly unidiomatic, pidgin-English title (The
Big Gundown, 1966), all from Powerhouse,
turned up in my mailbox early this year, and
these were soon followed by a finished Blu-
ray wrapped in cellophane of the no less
unrequested and undesired Hitman Hart:
Global Discoveries on DVD | By Jonathan Rosenbaum
Wrestling with Shadows, a 1998 Canadian doc-
umentary from Vinegar Syndrome.
Even if I accept the more probable and less
paranoid explanation that much of our planet
is currently undergoing a collective nervous
breakdown over identity politics, leading to
many mistaken surmises and false assump-
tions that each of us is making about the iden-
tities and interests of everyone else, I can’t
fathom what might have inaugurated this
trend in “restored” digital releases. Maybe all
our fighting with one another—or else pre-
tending to fight, as in wrestling—is what in-
spired it.
***
Another version of the same kind of identity
politics—the political correctness of individu-
als reduced to fighting over labels and symbols,
usually after failing to change the conditions,
people, and/or things being labelled or sym-
bolized—seems to be behind the sort of cul-
tural self-censorship that has lately overtaken
Criterion, a label that I’m delighted to report
sends me virtually all its new releases, even if
I’m occasionally less delighted by what they
send (and in some cases what they don’t pick
up and release). And I’ve been happy to remain
a paid subscriber to the Criterion Channel,
which has sufficiently expanded its offerings
in recent months to make this resource one of
my favourite movie sites, along with YouTube
and MUBI. (Thanks to this channel, it’s final-
ly possible to see all of Kiarostami’s Kanun
shorts, just for starters.)
But it’s a limitation of Criterion’s status as a
canonizer that its selections are inevitably the
results of business decisions, even if, as with
Library of America titles and Oscar winners,
these are commonly granted the prestige of
official cultural pronouncements from Mount
61
 Olympus by the general public. Much of this is
the public’s fault, the result of a certain men-
tal laziness encouraged by a lousy educational
system, but some of it also seems to come from
Criterion dutifully striving to toe the line when
it comes to certain PC reflexes. Even though
I’m sure that PC can’t explain all of their re-
cent curatorial decisions, I feel that some of
it must be behind their recent selection of
Michael Schultz’s uneven and formulaic first
feature, Cooley High (1975), over his far more
inventive and resourceful Car Wash (1976),
or their bringing out Robert Townsend’s
lightweight Hollywood Shuffle (1987) while
scooting past, for example, Charles Burnett’s
politically incorrect but much more interest-
ing and thoughtful The Glass Shield (1994) or
invaluable cubist approach to Nat Turner, A
Troublesome Property (2003).
As for Hollywood Shuffle, thanks to
Criterion, I’ve just started watching it for what
may well have been the first time—it’s hard
to be certain now about a satirical comedy
aimed at being timely in 1987 (and thus some-
what ephemeral afterwards, virtually by self-
definition). I laughed at some of the pointed
gags about the clichéd, stereotyped parts that
Black actors were expected to play in movies.
But then when Townsend offered an even fun-
nier segment with two ‘hood brothers, Speed
and Tyrone, doing their own versions of Siskel
and Ebert, I suddenly realized that he had to
make those brothers every bit as clichéd and
as stereotyped as his ostensible targets if he
wanted his gags to score. So I became a bit con-
fused about where he actually stood regarding
stereotypes. Turned into something histori-
cal, this satire becomes a more questionable
piece of goods, even with an informative es-
say by Aisha Harris titled “Against Type” that
seems to regard Speed and Tyrone as realistic
countertypes rather than clichés.
Of course, it’s possible that I’m making
wrong guesses and jumping to wrong conclu-
sions about the various deliberations involved
in these Criterion releases. As with any art-
related activity, we can judge and define only
effects, not intentions. But when it comes to
Criterion’s refusal to bring out Orson Welles’
The Other Side of the Wind (2018), even though
it reportedly has an exclusive contract with
Netflix—with the consequence that no one
else can commercially release a DVD or Blu-
ray of that film (which would allow us to see all
of Welles’ own edit of the sex scene in the car,
62
at least as an extra, rather than the shortened
version arrived at by a committee)—I can’t
help but conclude that the film’s spectacular
and shameless political incorrectness super-
sedes any understanding that most of Welles’
films improve with age once we gradually
learn how to adjust to them—a slow, wavering,
and sometimes painful process that has taken
us decades to unravel in the cases of The Lady
from Shanghai (1947) and Touch of Evil (1958)
and their shifting receptions.
In the case of the even more nightmarish
The Trial (1962)—not yet on a DVD or Blu-ray
in North America, although I’ve just seen a
35mm print of the crisp Rialto restoration—
we may still be hamstrung by the discrepan-
cies between Welles’ guilt-ridden rewriting of
Kafka in more Victorian and post-Holocaust
terms, his switching genders on both permis-
sive and demanding parents, and Kafka’s less
puritanical form of political incorrectness and
pre-Holocaust victimhood. Yet it does seem
ironic that Welles and Oja Kodar’s political-
ly incorrect autocritique of their own sexism
in The Other Side of the Wind is apparently
deemed inappropriate for thinking adults by
Criterion while most of the remainder of the
Welles oeuvre, sexism and all, with and with-
out autocritiques, is currently being celebrat-
ed on the Criterion Channel.
***
I haven’t been in a rush to see any more Lars
von Trier movies lately, but Criterion sending
me its Blu-ray box set devoted to the Europe
Trilogy that more or less launched his career—
The Element of Crime (1984), Epidemic (1987),
and Europa (1992)—goaded me into watching
the first of these features for the first time,
as well as a lengthy interview with von Trier
where he dismisses his own Medea (1988),
which pretended to be based on a Carl Dreyer
screenplay. It’s a sensible dismissal—making
me conclude, for once, that he can be a sensi-
ble man when he wants to.
And I must confess that for all my dislike of
most of von Trier’s work, he’s far more talent-
ed and technically adventurous than one- or
two-trick pony like Quentin Tarantino, who
keeps trotting out the same revenge scenari-
os and wishful historical rewrites to the same
rounds of startled applause from the same
fans who’ve conned themselves into forget-
ting the same circus tricks pulled on them the
last time around. (The Coen brothers similarly
fall back on the same cartoony gag about the
doofus who accidentally shoots himself in the
face as if this were a golden oldie.) And von
Trier is far more ambitious when it comes to
his alleged subject matter: while Tarantino is
preoccupied mainly with mechanical genre
conventions, the Danish piledriver turns out
a trilogy named after a continent (his own),
even if he can’t approach that subject in its
post-fascist phase on any terms except for a
few mechanical genre conventions such as se-
rial killers. And what fascinates me most about
Europa isn’t really its title subject but its jux-
tapositions of colour with black and white in
the same shots. (Speaking of which, the prin-
cipal monotonous colour of The Element of
Crime strikes my eyes as blazing orange red,
but some reviews say it’s yellow and others
opt for sepia. How much any of this impinges
on what von Trier has to think or say about
post-fascist Europe is negligible.)
Both Tarantino and von Trier seem proud
rather than ashamed of their compulsions to
imitate other filmmakers by reducing their sty-
listic flourishes and effects to mannerisms. This
is how and why von Trier’s Breaking the Waves
(1996) features a suffering heroine required
to imitate both Giulietta Masina in Federico
Fellini’s La strada (1954) and Renée Falconetti
in Carl Dreyer’s The Passion of Joan of Arc
(1928), apparently under the belief that the
styles, performances, and meanings of these
radically different films are compatible enough
to be mixed together. Similarly, von Trier has
avowed that the style of The Element of Crime
derives from both Andrei Tarkovsky and
Welles’ Touch of Evil, as if the belief systems of
those disparate sources, the mystical, open-air
pantheism of the former and the guilt-ridden,
claustrophobic liberalism of the latter, could be
gracefully joined at the hip. In both cases, one
person’s stylistic conviction becomes convert-
ed into another person’s nihilistic mannerism
by being tossed into the same boiling and over-
flowing postmodern stew.
In his essay on the Europe Trilogy for
Criterion, Howard Hampton becomes at times
almost von Trier’s literary successor by reduc-
ing (or is it elevating?) Europe and Europe
alike to a heady string of cultural references.
When he parenthetically asks us, “How many
films can you think of that not only quote
Finnegans Wake but earn it?” I don’t know
whether to thank him for this unexpected dis-
covery, fault him for not divulging what this
discovery is, or ask him what “earning” a quote
from Finnegans Wake consists of and counts
for, theoretically or actually. But all these pos-
sibilities get swiftly swept under the carpet
to make room for more cultural references:
“Epidemic…arrives at a multilayered eruption
that obliterates the line between The Passion
of Joan of Arc and Night of the Living Dead.”
(Surely more than a line separates these pic-
tures. But by all means let’s switch channels
before anyone can ponder whatever that line
might be.) “This is as devastating an ending as
horror has produced and an existential joke
for eternity.” So are we expected to scream,
vomit, laugh with philosophical knowingness
at the existential joke, or some ambitious and
ambiguous combination of all three? And if so,
why? Von Trier has more modestly claimed
that he wants it to function like a pebble in
one’s shoe, but he doesn’t bother to explain
why or how this pebble is supposed to matter.
A genuine (and genuinely tragic) philosophi-
cal parable such as Truffaut’s L’enfant sauvage
(1970), for instance, offers the vexing pebble
of suggesting how much the acquisition of lan-
guage is a grievous loss rather than a welcome
gain. But does anything that we might think
or feel about von Trier’s pebble really matter
all that much, except as a free-floating jolt?
Not necessarily, it would seem, because in the
next paragraph we find von Trier “ingeniously
reversing Franz Kafka’s Amerika in postwar
Germany” (without Kafka’s prose style or any
of his motivations) and find Barbara Sukowa
“channeling Hanna Schygulla channeling
Marlene Dietrich” (presumably without the
visual styles of Fassbinder or Sternberg and
for no particular reason apart from von Trier’s
desire for Sukowa to channel them). Moreover,
“Europa’s back-projected German wasteland
evokes Notorious (1946) and The Third Man
(1949)—corruption filtered through the lens of
entertainment,” thereby skirting reality (both
theirs and ours) for more weird effects, which
are apparently most of what’s desired from
these transactions. Yet some of these manoeu-
vres are filmed by Henning Bentsen, who also
shot Dreyer’s Ordet (1955) and Gertrud (1964).
Hampton, to his credit, wrestles with some
of the problematic results and ghastly moral
odours of all this scattershot experimental
cuisine, but grappling seriously with these re-
sults also inevitably involves some version of
duplicating them. So I guess my best recom-
mendation would be to hold your nose before
you even think of diving in.
63
 Maggie Hennefeld and Laura Horak, two of the editors of the 2019
collection Unwatchable (a book that allowed me to air more of my gripes
A CELEBRATION OF
against von Trier), have joined forces with Elif Rongen-Kaynak to produce
CANADIAN UNDERGROUND a four-disc Blu-ray/DVD set called Cinema’s First Nasty Women, focusing
CINEMA on the period of a little over a century ago when women seem to have had
the most sizable input on film culture. Kino Lorber couldn’t send me this
physical set in time for my deadline, but links to the films and the 112-page
booklet give me plenty of wild stuff to chew on, including the following
summary from the latter:
“Discs 1 and 2 center on early slapstick comedies from 1898 from across
Europe, the US, and the UK. In Disc 1, ‘Disastrous Domestics & Anarchic
Tomboys,’ vengeful kitchen maids and rambunctious teenagers conspire
to leave the domestic sphere in total shambles. This disc spotlights the
forgotten films of France’s Léontine, Italy’s Lea, and catastrophes both in
and out of the kitchen. Disc 2, ‘Queens of Destruction,’ features three pop-
FOR THE FIRST TIME
ular French comedienne characters, Cunégonde (Little Chrysia), Rosalie
ON HOME VIDEO and Pétronille (both played by Sarah Duhamel), as well as a curated sec-
tion on “Tyranny at Home.” Discs 3 and 4 pivot from burlesque slapstick
to cross-dressing and queer erotics. Disc 3, ‘Gender Rebels’ explores the
porousness of gender from cross-dressing girl spies to the gender hijinks
of the Wild West. This disc includes three surviving films from writer/
director/actor Gene Gauntier’s girl spy series and the best of Edna ‘Billy’
Foster’s work at Biograph. In Disc 4, ‘Female Tricksters,’ cross-dress-
ing provides myriad opportunities for accidental same-sex attraction,
and women don male attire to brave the mean streets of the early 20th-
century metropolis. In the set’s only two feature films, Evelyn Greeley
WITH COMMENTARIES, moonlights as both Sapphic dancer and male Latin professor in Phil for
DOCUMENTARIES, Short (1919), while theater star Mabel Taliaferro plays a headstrong society
girl who disguises herself as a boy to trick a ‘woman-hating’ French trapper
AND OTHER RARITIES
in the frontier BDSM fantasy, The Snowbird (1916).” The emphasis here,
contra von Trier and the Movie Brats, is on stuff that hasn’t already been
digitally available.

***
Finally, on another upbeat note, Second Run Features in the UK has
released on Blu-ray a restoration of one of the most exuberant movies of
the Czech New Wave, Vojtěch Jasný’s The Cassandra Cat (1963). I hope
I can be forgiven for revising and excerpting my 1991 capsule review of
this nugget:
“Long banned because of its satirical and antiauthoritarian tendencies,
this fantasy in ‘Scope and colour…describes what happens when a magic
show featuring a cat with a pair of eyeglasses turns up in a fairy-tale town.
When the eyeglasses are removed, people are obliged to show their ‘true
colors’—folks in love turn red, liars purple, thieves gray, betrayers yellow,
and the local kids see through the duplicity of the adults for the first time.
To complicate matters, the magic show and cat are described in advance by
WWW.BLACKZERO.CA a salty local layabout (Jan Werich) who serves as a sort of narrative equiv-
alent to the stage manager in Our Town and who entertains the schoolchil-
dren with his tales while serving as their art-class model; when the magic
show and cat arrive in the town, the magician is played by the same actor.
Whimsical, likable, and inventive, if never wholly successful, this colorful
cross between ‘The Pied Piper’ and a radicalized Bye Bye Birdie (coinciden-
tally released the same year) qualifies as one of the best early examples of
the Czech New Wave; significantly, Ivan Passer worked on it as a second
unit director. Also known as That Cat… and One Day a Cat.”

64
 Canadiana | By Joshua Minsoo Kim

Strange Codes

Nothing and Everything

Black Zero Begins

The three inaugural releases from Black Zero, a new archival label
dedicated to Canadian experimental cinema, are unified by their
mystique and uncompromising, adventurous spirit. This new en-
terprise is particularly exciting because it’s supervised by Stephen
Broomer, an author, director, film preservationist, and programmer
who has spent many years championing the Canadian avant-garde,
and he’s evidently approached this project with the utmost serious-
ness. Restored and presented on Blu-ray, accompanied by essays and
commentaries that provide crucial context and insight, these films
are here given the treatment they’ve always deserved.
The most immediately exciting work is Palace of Pleasure (1967),
a dual-screen film by John Hofsess. Inspired by Andy Warhol’s
Exploding Plastic Inevitable, a multimedia performance he helped
bring to McMaster University in Ontario, Hofsess recognized the
sort of sensorial ecstasies that could be brought to his own practice.
In his essay “Towards a New Voluptuary,” which comes packaged

65
with the release, Hofsess makes clear that he values the filmic medi-
um for its potential therapeutic properties. What “cinematherapy”
entails is not some sort of ambient reverie a viewer can reside inside,
but something more complex and participatory: Hofsess wants his
images to “penetrate the censorious mechanisms of the mind and
explode,” while the accompanying music provides an avenue to
channel our younger selves, a time when we were “freer and more
spontaneous.” In short, Hofsess wanted his work to have a profound
impact on anyone watching, so much so that it would be impossible
to distance oneself from what was onscreen. In his words, audiences
would be “rediscovering their freedom.”
Such hyperbolic phrasing, especially when paired with the psy-
chedelic films from this era, can lead to eye rolls: okay, we get it, these
colours are transportive. But Palace of Pleasure is an undeniably af-
fecting work, the use of dual screens thoughtfully considered, inter-
acting in ways that are more playful than in, say, Warhol’s Chelsea
Girls (1966). Intended as a trilogy, the 38-minute film features two
completed parts, titled Redpath 25 and Black Zero (the third was
never finished). Redpath 25 begins with irresistible images, enticing
not just because they look stunning—a woman (Patricia Murphy)
bathed in vermilion light, a metal structure twirls with a golden hue,
a sexual encounter arises in the midst of reflective foil—but also
because of its effective montage. Hofsess seductively oscillates be-
tween different modes, utilizing close-ups of faces, abstract colour
figures, and chemical treatments of film to depict sensuality beyond
direct representation. It’s not just the palpable sensation of touch
that impresses, but the rhythms of every shot and cut.
While all this appears on the left channel, the right screen shows
black-and-white footage of the Vietnam War, with a stationary image
of a man’s face, coloured jade and looking downward, superimposed
on top. If there is an anti-war sentiment here, it’s less instructional
than experiential: look at this other set of frenetic images, Hofsess
seems to suggest, and see that war doesn’t offer anything but drab
misery. The Who’s “My Generation” plays on the soundtrack, though
it acts as too neat a symbol for iconoclasm.
Leonard Cohen later arrives to read some of his poetry, his solemn
tone transitioning the film from the vibrancy of Redpath 25 to Black
Zero’s more serious demeanour. Here, both projections have some
semblance of narrative: a woman paints, people slit their wrists in
some ritualistic practice, and a couple embrace in bed as another
man (a young David Cronenberg) lies on the other side. These scenes
play out alongside passages with colourful geometric patterns, which
Hofsess created by holding a kaleidoscope in front of the camera as
footage was projected on a wall. They’re initially mesmerizing, but
when he relies on them for too long, the images devolve into a tepid
haze; it feels like little more than a neat party trick. It is tedious to
only see these morphing colours and shapes, trusting that they are
adequately prismatic. In interspersing them with other images (and
with the aid of dual projection), Hofsess reminds us of the constant
transformation taking place onscreen, and how everything exists as
an interconnected web. The early image of a blazing rose lingers in
my mind when seeing people kiss later in the film, bridging the sym-
bolic with the real. And when Hofsess projects colourful splotches
over human bodies near the film’s end, abstraction and reality finally
become one.
66
Given how striking and varied the images are across Palace
of Pleasure, it’s a shame that they’re occasionally sullied by the
soundtrack. The sound of noodling guitar melodies can be hypnotic,
but here it registers as unnecessary hand-holding. Still, something
like the Velvet Underground’s “European Son” is mostly appropri-
ate, its extended riffs and noisy feedback allowing the images to re-
main sufficiently abstract, and even helping to link the side-by-side
images: the energy of kaleidoscopic colours on the left animates the
slowly intertwining bodies on the right. “I’m Waiting for the Man” is
an awkward choice, however, mainly because it contains too many
sung words, detracting from the visuals. Palace of Pleasure ends on
a perplexing note: the song plays out without any images, and we’re
left listening to it in a dark room. I would love to say that reducing
this multi-sensory experience into one of pure audio is a poignant
distillation, but it’s really just anticlimactic.
Those wanting to be further confounded can look to Arthur
Lipsett’s Strange Codes (1972), the sole independent work made
by the filmmaker after he left the National Film Board of Canada.
While his first shorts under the institution were sharply edited col-
lages portraying society in cryptic manners, this 23-minute film,
shot in a Toronto home, is hard to pin down. It begins with a grey
screen, which turns out to be Lipsett’s own body as he moves out of
the frame. Perspectives continue to shift as he reveals boards filled
with drawings and notes. There’s an insistence on having the viewer
decipher the significance of every clue, an idea made clearer when
we see the letters “X” and “W” on different sheets of paper, recalling
the evidence marker shown in Lipsett’s 1968 film Fluxes. Has a mur-
der occurred? The film cuts to a shot of Lipsett’s body on the ground,
implying as much; but then he appears in a subsequent shot, sitting
up and assembling a Trojan Horse.
Strange Codes is a thrilling experience because it is maddeningly
impenetrable. The title is first seen on a small note card, and then
appears in larger text on a piece of paper, which is casually thrown
in front of the camera. It’s not that Lipsett is being cavalier so much
as setting the scene, priming the viewer for an experience that’s
looser than his prior works. Given the constant sense-making of his
montages, it is natural to approach Strange Codes with a similarly in-
quisitive mindset. We see a Tower of Hanoi puzzle with three rods,
then three unmarked boxes, then a strip of paper with three words:
“UMERUS,” “SATOR,” and “PARTIO.” Are all these connected? It’s
never explicitly clear.
Other elements are easier to connect. A performance of The
Monkey King is the film’s primary soundtrack, and its distinct fiddles,
clapper drums, and small gongs suffuse each scene with a ceremonial
energy. Lipsett dons a mask to become the mythical figure, and as he
reads a translation dictionary, there’s a sense that he finds the crea-
ture’s powers—he can make copies of himself, transform into other
animals, and travel at ridiculous speeds—as analogous to the power
of both film and performance. Just as his previous films drew links
between its found footage, so here does Lipsett create an expanding
network with every symbol, object, and gesture.
Interspersed with the Beijing opera performance is an interview
with cybernetics pioneer Warren Sturgis McCulloch, whose mus-
ings Lipsett had incorporated into previous films of his (all of them
excerpted from a two-part 1962 NFB program called The Living

Machine). This constant return to the material is emblematic of the
inquiry at the heart of our participation in this work: we must con-
tinually probe, accepting that an infinite number of things can be
gleaned from a single source. “What we lack is a logic of relations,”
McCulloch explains, as if reprimanding us. “It practically does not
exist.” That Lipsett puts on different costumes throughout the film,
and is seen looking through binoculars and magnifying glasses, acts
as a mirror: he’s engaging in the same sort of puzzling.
Strange Codes was made when Lipsett’s mental health was in de-
cline, and responses to the film—both at the time and today—have in-
cluded derisive complaints about its inscrutable nature. Perhaps in
response to such incuriosity, Broomer includes an 84-minute shot-
by-shot breakdown of the film on this release. It’s commendable, but
feels like overkill, as if he is stripping the work of its intrigue. I prefer
to approach the film somewhere between these two poles, knowing
that each rewatch will reward further insight without caring for full
comprehension. More than anything, Strange Codes demands your
attention, asking you to understand the capacity for meaning that
images can hold.
This high regard for the image is crystal clear across Keith Lock’s
1972 feature Everything Everywhere Again Alive. The work docu-
ments a year or so at Buck Lake, a locale where Lock and other art-
ists had removed themselves from the larger world and where they
lived without electricity, plumbing, or running water. We see them
construct a barn, cut each other’s hair, ride on snowmobiles—at face
value, this is a diaristic document of their everyday life.
In 1975, Lock explained that this work is “about human con-
struction, human nourishment and natural processes…It requires
common sense and mysterious uncommon sense at the same time.”
These two sentences reveal how the film’s form and content are in-
terwoven. One of the most effective strategies that Lock considers
Everything Everywhere Again Alive
is sound: he forgoes any of it for a lot of his shots, allowing each im-
age to feel even more intimate, like we’re an outsider peering into
something sacred. That’s true in some sense—the freedom to live in
a DIY community of this sort is increasingly difficult today, and there
may be nothing more holy than the bonds that unite friends—but the
images often glow with an unmatched purity. There is an astound-
ing shot of a kitchen, where a kettle boils and eggs are cooked, that is
reminiscent of Larry Gottheim’s simple, beautiful Corn (1970). I was
in awe at its resplendence.
At various moments throughout the film we hear minimal,
humming synth tones, which were added because Lock felt he
heard such sounds coming from the images themselves. The nois-
es somehow reduce and expand the footage at the same time,
distilling them into specific moods while revealing how much
more is contained therein. It’s an elegant manoeuvre that is
matched by another interesting strategy: graphics (shapes, num-
bers, a circuit diagram) are overlaid atop images. Formally, these
feel in line with works by other Canadian filmmakers like Joyce
Wieland and R. Bruce Elder, and they call attention to the surface
of the film plane, as if inviting us to view everything as a spectacle
behind glass.
On a basic level, these drawings add another layer of intrigue to
the film’s straightforward images. They also hold deeper meanings,
as when a tiny circle is placed in the middle of the screen. In an inter-
view with Lock that comes with the release, he explains that circles
can represent nothing (as in the number zero) and everything (since
it has no beginning or end). He also says that being outside feels a lot
like this shape: open. Through its formal experiments and homey de-
pictions of life outside, Everything Everywhere Again Alive channels
freedom—it gives you a taste of it through its gentle, alluring images,
and leaves you wanting more.
67
 Deaths of Cinema | By Will Sloan

Alien from L.A.

Dreaming at
the Video Store
Albert Pyun (1953-2022)
Back in the days of dial-up internet, when I would visit websites with
names like badmovies.org and stomptokyo.com on my parents’ com-
puter to teach myself the Psychotronic Cinema canon, the one film-
maker who seemed completely without defenders was Albert Pyun.
“If the words boredom and cyborgs ring a bell,” wrote a reviewer
for a still-extant website called Sci-Fi Movie Page, “then it’s because
they are synonymous with the director Albert Pyun (does it rhyme
with pain?), whose other movies such as Nemesis and Cyborg should
be banned under the Geneva Convention or something.” This was
the sort of critical judgment that still defined Pyun to me as late as
2018, when my friend Justin Decloux told me he was writing a book
about the filmmaker and marathoning his complete works. Albert
Pyun? The director of that botched version of Captain America
(1990) that used to haunt late-night TV? I’m ashamed to say that the
idea of studying him initially struck me as sheer perversity.

68
 By November 26, 2022—the day Pyun passed away at age 69 af-
ter a long and public struggle with multiple sclerosis and early on-
set dementia—his standing in film culture had both evolved and
remained static. The industry in which he toiled had turned its
back on him decades before, and that didn’t change (his memorial
service was made possible through GoFundMe). What changed was
the outpouring of love for Pyun on social media, where fans posted
screenshots of his many striking images: Jean-Claude Van Damme
on the cross in Cyborg (1989); John Stockwell and Michael Dudikoff
doing a soft-shoe in the future-world of Radioactive Dreams (1985);
the junkyard dystopia of Alien from L.A. (1988), to name a few. Many
wrote of discovering his films as kids on the video-store shelves that
were their natural habitats. Others found them through file-sharing,
Tubi, Twitch streams, and other subterranean networks for modern
cinephilia. He became, as my friend Ethan Vestby tweeted, “One of
the filmmakers I most associate with Letterboxd.”
Justin’s book, called Radioactive Dreams: The Cinema of Albert
Pyun, makes a persuasive case for Pyun as a tenacious artist whose
50-film body of work represented the triumph of imagination in
the unlikeliest circumstances—a sort-of Edgar G. Ulmer for the
Blockbuster Video era. Many of his films are about the ingenuity of
their own making: how, when most of the budget for his sci-fi rock
musical Vicious Lips (1986) disappeared before shooting, Pyun went
ahead with $100,000 and a seven-day shooting schedule; how, as
retaliation for being forced into reshoots on Cyborg, Pyun secret-
ly shot a clever one-location comedy-thriller called Deceit (1990)
after hours for $22,000; how, when the home-video market had
dried up and his career was left for dead, he self-financed a one-long-
take found-footage horror film called Invasion (2005). “Pyun didn’t
sound like a hack at all,” wrote Justin. “He sounded like a driven film-
maker who fought tooth and nail for every project.”
Stories like these only really count for anything if the films are
worth watching. What unites these and other Pyun films is not just
their resourcefulness, but also their off-kilter imagination and sense
of sheer movie-love. The key milestone in my own journey with
Pyun came via a 35mm screening of Radioactive Dreams at Toronto’s
Royal Cinema, which accompanied the launch of Justin’s book. This
uncategorizable film stars Stockwell and Dudikoff as wannabe-
gumshoes in a post-apocalyptic dystopia who stumble into a soci-
ety of irradiated mutants, created through thrift-store costumes
and beautifully tactile makeup effects. Full of action and drenched
in smoky, neon-lit atmosphere, the film refuses to sit still and
commit to one genre or style. The two stars dress in ’40s garb, talk
like Raymond Chandler characters, and act like Laurel & Hardy.
Occasionally the film breaks for music, including an MTV-ready
number called “Guilty Pleasures,” as well as the stars’ aforemen-
tioned soft-shoe finale. There’s always something nifty to look at,
and as with many of Pyun’s best movies, there is a sense that any-
thing is allowed onscreen as long as the director thinks it’s cool. This
infectious spirit has kept me coming back to Pyun, and I’ve found
traces of it even in his weakest films.
Radioactive Dreams was Pyun’s second film, and one of several
troubled productions that started his career on the wrong foot. Born
in Hawaii in 1953, Pyun spent his boyhood as an “army brat,” and
credited his world-travelling with the sense of cross-cultural fusion
he would bring to his work (he imported elements Hong Kong wuxia
films for 1993’s very fun Knights and bullet-ballet action for 1997’s
excellent Mean Guns). More firmly settled in Hawaii as a teenager,
he made 8mm movies and worked at local production houses before
travelling to Japan after scoring an internship with Toshiro Mifune
(he was supposed to work on Kurosawa’s Dersu Uzula [1975] before
the star and director fell out). Back in Hawaii, he kept plugging away
in TV commercials before landing his feature debut, The Sword and
the Sorcerer (1982)—the best and worst thing to ever happen to his
career. Meant to cash in on Excalibur, and accidentally anticipat-
ing its contemporary Conan the Barbarian (1982), this inventively
splattery film plays like a dreamy fusion of all the sword-and-sandal
fantasy blockbusters of the time. Its blockbuster success should have
propelled Pyun to the A-list, but friction with his producer, as well as
his own inexperience navigating the studio system, quickly doomed
him to becoming a house director at the beleaguered Cannon Films.
Starting at the bottom, he then worked his way down.
The visual imagination and action-packed, anything-goes en-
ergy of Cannon productions like Alien from L.A. and Cyborg, and
well-funded direct-to-video efforts like Dollman (1991), Nemesis
(1992), and Brain Smasher…A Love Story (1993), hint at the kind of
creativity and spectacle he might have brought to studio produc-
tions. As the ’90s wore on, Pyun’s budgets kept shrinking, but his im-
agination can still be seen in the floating giallo camera of the Charlie
Sheen-led murder mystery Postmortem (1998) and the moody,
dreamlike tone of Crazy Six (1997). Movies like these are easier to
appreciate now that Blu-ray has revealed the widescreen photogra-
phy of Pyun’s regular cinematographer George Mooradian, who kept
shooting them like real movies even though they were destined to be
panned and scanned.
As the direct-to-video market dried up, Pyun continued working in
increasingly impoverished conditions. You won’t find many defend-
ers of his stitched-together Steven Seagal joint Ticker (2000) or the
martial-arts movie that was his professional Waterloo, Max Havoc:
Curse of the Dragon (2004). Self-financing and self-distributing his
later work at least gave Pyun room to experiment and express his
personality. An unusual, ambitious latter-day effort is Road to Hell
(2012), an unauthorized sequel to Streets of Fire (1984) that catches
up with Michael Paré’s character years after the original. Full of mu-
sic, set in a digital dreamscape rendered on consumer-grade hard-
ware, and treating Paré like the icon he never became, it’s an admira-
ble attempt by Pyun to adapt his style for the digital age.
In 2013, Pyun was diagnosed with dementia, and announced his
retirement from filmmaking. That retirement never happened. As
his condition continued to worsen, he still participated in inter-
views, interacted with fans online, and worked on various movie
projects, including an unfinished Cyborg sequel. His was not a per-
fect career, but it was a moving and sometimes genuinely inspired
one, and I hope he’s now seated alongside Welles, Franco, Steckler,
Kuchar, and Mekas at the table of great filmmakers for whom crea-
tion was life.
69
UN BEAU MATIN
Mia Hansen-Løve, France/UK/Germany
BY HANNAH SEIDLITZ
Something has always struck me as misogynis-
tic about inquisitions into the autobiographi-
cal bases of art made by women, as if art about
lived experience is less valuable or less imagi-
native, and that the experiences of women in
particular carry less intellectual weight. But
there are instances where autofiction permits
storytellers to forget the structural demands
of narrative, a fate which befalls the French
filmmaker Mia Hansen-Løve in her latest fea-
ture, Un beau matin, whose pat ending doesn’t
suit her characters so much as her own mem-
ory. Léa Seydoux plays a widowed translator,
Sandra, whose work transcends the German
lectures and Normandy commemoration
ceremonies she dutifully interprets. Sandra’s
aging father Georg (Pascal Greggory), once
a great philosophy professor, suffers from a
neurodegenerative disorder that has robbed
him of the cognitive dexterity on which he’d
long prided himself. Sandra also translates the
world for Georg, describing their surround-
ings when he becomes bewildered in his as-
sisted living facility and alert to more than his
basic nonverbal signals, and in turn interprets
Georg for the rest of the world. In a wrenching
moment of exquisite clarity for both Seydoux
and Greggory, she understands that when he
asks if she’ll put him to bed, what he’s really
requesting is for her to help him die.
Amidst the deterioration of her father
and the everyday loneliness of life with her
young bereft daughter Linn (Camille Leban
70
Martins), Sandra encounters a married friend
of her late husband in the park. Clément
(Melvil Poupaud) is a cosmochemist who voy-
ages to the farthest reaches of the Earth to col-
lect and analyze dust from outer space. “We
leave the world of rational beings,” he says at
his research office, in an almost annoying quip
of foreshadowing (perhaps he’s making a sug-
gestion to her, just as the film is to us), as he
leads Sandra into the room where they will
soon begin an affair. Before Clément her life
is rote, leaden with responsibility, and absent
any passion, and her ambivalence toward her-
self and dearth of time for matters of vanity
is manifest in her sartorial choices—her hair
short and unstyled, she wears boxy T-shirts
and pants, button-downs. After their first kiss,
her outfits begin to cut more feminine silhou-
ettes, and by the time they’ve slept together,
she flirts and flounces in floral dresses. He’s
awoken something in her. As she says to him
after he walks her home one night, “that part”
of her life had been over.
The breeziness and half-baked cerebral
posturing that I’ve always found vacuous in
Éric Rohmer’s work (to the chagrin of most
everyone I know and respect) is echoed in
nearly all of Mia Hansen-Løve’s films. She re-
lies on the sublimity of her landscapes to in-
voke awe, from the bucolic warmth of Fårö’s
seaside grasses and silos in Bergman Island
(2021) to the golden-hour summer light over
the quais in Un beau matin. Her compositions
are lucky for the beauty of her actors and set-
tings; otherwise, they communicate little in
the way of their arrangement and framing.
Hansen-Løve told the New York Times that
the film’s final scene, a sentimental and overly
literal trip to the top of Sacré-Coeur (she can’t
even resist a literal freeze-frame finale), gain-
ing an aerial view of the city which has been
stifling Sandra for the duration, was some-
thing that really happened. What’s unfortu-
nate about real life is that often it can seem
too obvious, narratively inelegant, or stranger
than fiction. The risk that attends autobio-
graphical art is that the author might believe
an ending is earned merely because it is true,
a perilous presumption that bloats any work
with lazy ego.
The inevitability of history, whatever the
demands of the fiction might be, also encum-
bers the plot. After the family is informed that
Georg must be relocated, Sandra’s mother,
Françoise (Nicole Garcia), warns how dread-
ful private nursing homes are, disclosing that
Georg may be condemned to live in a wing de-
scribed as “Autonomy Level One.” Indeed, it
often feels like Sandra operates at Autonomy
Level One. She’s a protagonist to whom things
continue happening, but whose only real acts
of agency are defiance, resistance, and leaving
one room to cry in another. While they prepare
her father for the hospital, she retires to his
bedroom to pack his shirts and breaks down.
Later on, in a pivotal moment, she flees an im-
promptu singalong to weep privately down the
hall. Even when Clément hurts her feelings, all
she can stand to do is weave behind some laby-
rinthine hedges, only for him to jump out and
scare her at the end.
At times, the quiet agony of playing by-
stander to Sandra’s passivity deftly tugs the
viewer’s sympathies, but occasionally it verg-
es on tedium. “Why do we wait?” her father
asks her, ostensibly hallucinating, but getting
at the deeper paucity of their lives. When she
and Clément first encounter each other in
the park, he asks why she never calls. “It’s you
who leaves,” she says, and he does, three times.
Excruciatingly Barthesian—“the lover’s fatal
identity is precisely this: I am the one who
waits,” he wrote—the narrative seems to be
constructed backwards. We watch as the main
character, the engine of the story, is pulled
through the lives of the two people dearest
to her: her lover, flighty, and impetuous; and
her father, in need of her constant care. She
always comes when Clément calls despite the
pain he causes, and is always ready to embrace
him when he returns to her, which he does
each of the three times. Even her own daugh-
ter doesn’t reciprocate her bids for affection.
Early on, Sandra climbs in bed behind Linn,
coaxing, “it takes two to snuggle,” but the girl
stays limp.
The film’s greatest achievement comes
in its revelations about the way we interact
with art. In the hospital, Georg ruminates on
the condition of terminal illness as a plotless-
ness, lamenting that each day used to have the
identifiable edges of a film with a beginning,
middle, and end, but now there’s nothing, just
this waiting for something he doesn’t know is
going to come. Structural imperfections of the
screenplay aside, Hansen-Løve has written
some of her best dialogue here. “I feel closer
to my father with his books than with him,”
Sandra says—more of him is reflected in the
texts with which he surrounded himself than
the body in the hospital. The truest heartbreak
of the film is not the rejection by her lover, but
from her father, though the abandonments
mirror each other. Even from the first scene,
when Georg refuses to put his cell phone down
in order to eat the quiche Sandra has prepared,
he asks after his “companion,” Leila; he needs
to eat, but he wants romance. The conflict be-
tween what one needs and what they want sits
at the heart of the film, and, as Rohmer often
concludes, there’s no trumping desire, not
even with self-destruction. No matter what
Sandra does for Georg, upending her calendar
to care for him day after day, to take buses and
trains and cars to the many facilities in which
he stays, he always wants Leila. Eventually,
Georg tells Sandra, apropos of nothing, only
three people matter to him: Leila, himself,
and a third person he can’t remember. When
Sandra probes him, thinking her father might
be joking, that of course it’s her, of course
she matters, he says, that’s just it, he doesn’t
know. She wants to save him, but she needs to
be loved.
Arguably the most meaningful act of
Sandra’s is a small but potent one—her father
calls and she lets it ring. “But what if he needs
something?” Linn asks. “He always does,”
Sandra replies, exhausted, before snatching
her daughter’s ice cream cone for just a taste
of something sweet, for just a lick of pleasure.
Georg’s mother, well into her nineties but with
better vision and mobility than even him, ex-
plains to her granddaughter why she doesn’t
run all the errands she needs to, saying that
too much is in need of repair. You can’t fix
it all.
71
INFINITY POOL
Brandon Cronenberg, Canada/Croatia/Hungary
BY SAFFRON MAEVE
There are few sights more imprinting than
Alexander Skarsgård, nearly nude and with
a silicone cap and cheek retractor, pouring
himself feet-first into polychromatic sludge.
He’s almost unrecognizable in his starkness,
eyeballs positively juddering with fear as the
room fills with liquid, all so he can elude cap-
ital punishment. As with fidelity and morals,
the legalities within Brandon Cronenberg’s
Infinity Pool are elastic.
As with the director’s previous films
Antiviral (2012) and Possessor (2020), Infinity
Pool stages a familiar sci-fi scenario, but rath-
er more dully than do its predecessors. Author
James Foster (Skarsgård) and his wife Em
(Cleopatra Coleman) are visiting a coast-
al resort in the fictional country of Li Tolqa,
where the locals are celebrating “Umbramaq,”
or “The Summoning,” a festival of friendship
and feasting. It’s an indulgent time for the
Li Tolqans and their guests, though there’s
a ritualized dread to the country’s ambigu-
ous local culture, with the sinister live music
scoring the breakfast buffet a fitting accom-
paniment to the macabre Ekki masks worn by
hotel staff.
Complemented by a gunmetal colour pal-
ette and generous Dutch angles (the Brandon
C. special, it seems), the Indigenous mythos
of rebirth and masquerade at the film’s cen-
tre sets into motion a chain of disconcerting
events. Bored by their wealth and each other,
72
James and Em meet Gabi (Mia Goth), a bubbly
commercial actress, and her husband Alban
(Jalil Lespert), a retired architect. Gabi turns
out to be a superfan of James’ sole novel The
Variable Sheath (which, he notes, “not a lot
of people read”), and the two couples wind
up dining together and proceed to escape the
grounds of the resort. During the ensuing
hours spent, grilling, sunbathing, and loafing
around on the beach, Gabi gives James a dis-
passionate handjob, resulting in a vague cum-
shot splashing on gravel (in lieu of the original
cut’s more daring full-frontal ejaculation).
There’s a lingering disquietude to their ad-
ventures which doesn’t fully materialize until
James, driving his drunken ensemble back to
the resort, hits and kills a local man crossing
the road.
Gabi forcefully urges the group to return
to the resort rather than go to the police of an
“uncivilized, brutal, filthy country.” Clearly,
she knows something. The next morning, lo-
cal officials bring James and Em in for ques-
tioning, where they are informed of Li Tolqa’s
penalty for murder: death at the hands of the
victim’s eldest son, in order to preserve the
family’s honour (a premise similar to John
Michael McDonagh’s The Forgiven [2021],
starring Cronenberg alumni Caleb Landry-
Jones). The buried caveat—a detail known to
Gabi—is that James can duck his fate for a fee.
Em can afford it.
Beneath his Twilight Zone set-up,
Cronenberg configures a corporeal econo-
my by which moneyed Westerners can chew
off their previous convictions. “The Revised
Process of Doubles Act,” a long-standing tour-
ism initiative with a classically Cronenbergian
title, allows international visitors to create
a double—complete with all their memories
and, crucially, guilt— who will carry out the
physical toll of a death sentence for them,
while the individual watches “himself” die
from nearby bleachers. James cautiously con-
sents, resulting in a sticky procedure—which,
like all of Cronenberg’s sci-fi-isms to date, is
not mechanically spelled out, but conveyed
through editing—in an art-deco execution
chamber, where proto-James watches his dou-
ble bleed out from two dozen knife wounds
to the abdomen. Em is horrified; James
appears aroused.
Herein lies the Blade Runner-esque catch:
is the James we encounter post-procedure—
who, according to Em, has “gone wrong
around the eyes”—a double? And if he is load-
ed with the same bodily and cerebral com-
position as the original James, does it even
matter? However, such meaty questions re-
main uninvestigated, to the film’s detriment.
The semi-ironic eugenics of copy-pasting a
Skarsgård, using what is effectively the rich
man’s method of procreation, are also left to
twist idly in the wind.
 James is intrigued by the prospect of safe-
guarded crime, and opts to stay at the resort.
There, he is introduced by Gabi to a group of
affectionately self-titled “zombies,” who vaca-
tion in Li Tolqa annually to partake in a bit of
the old ultraviolence, pump out a few doubles,
and watch them choke on their own blood.
With James now in tow, they proceed to stir up
enough sanctioned debauchery to quadruple
their likenesses while racking up an impres-
sive rap sheet.
Infinity Pool does well to position James
as an outsider, potentially drawn less to the
spectacle of murder than harbouring a fet-
ish for controlled, painless self-mutilation.
A failed writer living off of his wife’s fortune,
eyes widening only at the prospect of witness-
ing his own demise, he’s a memorably pathet-
ic depiction of privileged failure. These ideas
are rarely pushed beyond the realm of simple
observation, however, and once the novelty
of downcycling corpses wanes, so too do the
film’s stakes and shock value. In both Antiviral
and Possessor, the anxieties were viscerally
richer, be they physiological complications,
intravenous maladies, or the annoyance (and
horror) of shared corporeality. Infinity Pool, by
contrast, is impelled by detachment: the mul-
tiplicity and subsequent dispensability of the
body, as a house for stray urges. The threat of
replication is not as sinister as that of physical
invasion or anatomical melding, which seem
to be two of the driving forces of the direc-
tor’s emergent style. (One would be remiss to
not also mention Cronenberg Sr.’s fascination
with penetration and indwelling, although
such comparisons can only go so far for fans
and detractors alike.)
And then there is the script’s half-baked cri-
tique of colonialism, which Cronenberg gently
alludes to through his troupe of wealthy, white
egoists mucking about Li Tolqa like a spacious
playground. Beyond the nod to Western explo-
ration as an exploitative practice—an inargua-
ble truth already well-worn onscreen—Infinity
Pool is, for the better part of its runtime, a bi-
nary project, invested in timid abstractions of
goodness versus badness, conqueror versus
quitter, and the righteous self versus its carnal
truths. Cronenberg’s characters have histori-
cally forsaken moral culpability—such is the
final beat of his two prior features, where the
protags messily excise their guilt through ca-
thartic violence. James, too, gives into some-
thing, though it’s unclear whether that thing
takes the shape of rage, guilt, animality, pro-
gress, or regression.
In his 2019 short Please Speak Continuously
and Describe Your Experiences as They Come
to You, the director surveyed a psychiatric
patient (Deragh Campbell) whose night-
mares are bleeding into her present reality.
To convey her instability cinematographi-
cally, DP Karim Hussain (who has shot all of
Brandon Cronenberg’s films) cuts together
images of nude strangers, melty skin, inky
blood in a gaping mouth, and a mass of virid,
stroboscopic faces. In Possessor, a scorned
man envisions a fluorescent orange bedroom
where he mashes the face of his adversary
and wears it like a mask, with quick cuts to
intercourse and stabbing. Infinity Pool indulg-
es the same filmic behaviours in a sequence
where James, in a drug-fuelled state, hallu-
cinates a prismatic orgy wherein beautiful
women obscure their faces with Ekki masks
and secrete a wormlike substance from their
nipples. This gorno fantasy of orgasm min-
gling with disfigurement is transfixing and
grotesque, but to nauseate is only half the
work; if these images are divorced from the
film’s cadence, from our oblique, unlikeable
protagonist, then they do less to support than
to confound.
Cronenberg’s neon-licked intercuts may
very well be a mechanism of lassoing an in-
creasingly ungovernable plot (no filmmaker is
exempt from their own coping mechanisms),
but they certainly arouse suspicion as to what
exactly the characters are chasing: virility,
control, wealth, self-harm? It’s a shame, then,
that Infinity Pool somersaults into a hermetic
metaphor for emasculation—complete with
a Skarsgård double as somebody’s leashed
bitch—where it might have otherwise stood on
its hind legs and let out an assured cry.
73
KNOCK AT THE CABIN
M. Night Shyamalan, US
BY BRENDAN BOYLE
Any careful viewing of M. Night Shyamalan’s
filmography indicates that the writer-director,
now reigning king of his own small fiefdom in
what remains of the American movie busi-
ness, thinks a lot about storytelling. During
the period in which he became a pariah—a
figure of fun for critics, audiences, and paro-
dists like the creators of South Park—one of
his most-mocked films was Lady in the Water
(2006), in which the residents of an apartment
building band together to safeguard a nymph
named Story. These characters learn that they
all have prescribed roles to play in a classical
myth, roles like the Guardian, the Symbolist,
the Healer, and the Guild, all of which sound
more like concepts from a screenwriting man-
ual than any recognizable tale from folklore.
Critics ridiculed Lady in the Water, but
this concept has been central to many of
Shyamalan’s most successful movies: that his
characters are predestined to act out a con-
flict chosen for them, and that accepting their
roles in the story can cut through their self-
doubts, traumas, angst, and crises of faith. In
the trilogy of films that Shyamalan named for
a train derailment, “Eastrail 177”—which be-
gan with Unbreakable (2000), and continued
with Split (2016) and Glass (2019) —the frame-
work was that of comic books, which Samuel
74
L. Jackson’s Machiavellian, genetically infirm
Elijah “Mr. Glass” Price explicitly compared
to fine art and ancient myth. With Old (2021),
Shyamalan ditched the talk of character ar-
chetypes and monomyth for a more viscerally
satisfying analogy. The “beach that makes you
old” compressed a storm of biological compli-
cations into a feature-length runtime, a life-
time of excitement contained in less than two
hours—which, of course, is the basic promise
of all genre movies.
In Knock at the Cabin, which Shyamalan
adapted from Jeff Tremblay’s novel The Cabin
at the End of the World, the filmmaker seem-
ingly had less room to incorporate his pet con-
cerns, opting instead for source material that
presented a natural fit for his sensibility. The
book combined Shyamalan’s favoured theme
of ordinary people confronted by the impos-
sible with the familiar plot set-up of a home
invasion, in a text ready-made, like so many
bestsellers, for the big screen. A cabin geta-
way for seven-year-old Wen (Kristen Cui) and
dads Eric (Jonathan Groff ) and Andrew (Ben
Aldridge) becomes the site of a microcosmic
conflict when four intruders (Dave Bautista,
Nikki Amuka-Bird, Rupert Grint, Abby Quinn)
arrive bearing strange weapons and a dooms-
day prophecy: if the family does not choose
to violently sacrifice one of their own, within
days, the world will end.
Tremblay’s novel analogized America’s bit-
ter red-blue divide through the conflict be-
tween Eric and Andrew’s empiricist, rational
worldview and the seemingly unshakeable
faith of the intruders. Confirmation bias is the
order of the day: every new calamity glimpsed
on the daily news reinforces the intruders’
understanding of the apocalyptic visions
that drove them together, while Andrew—a
“Believe Science” dad, one infers, contra the
more spiritual Eric, who spends much of the
film concussed—picks holes in their prem-
ise, objecting that the events onscreen must
have begun long before their ordeal, and
therefore couldn’t be triggered by the brutal
rituals they enact in the cabin. The visitors’
distressed determination bolsters a struc-
turing metaphor for the Gnostic conspiracy
theories that came to dominate American life
in the Trump years: Pizzagate, QAnon, the
Great Replacement.
After teasing out this uneasy parlour game
for much of the book, Tremblay only has one
card to play: the third-act violation of a ta-
boo so shocking that it grinds his story to a
halt, spinning out its wheels in the denoue-
ment. Shyamalan, for his part, has opted for
something more authentically disturbing and
unsettling, by siding with the intruders. His
adaptation, having honoured the uncertainty
and instability of 21st-century life for the first
two acts, allows Bautista’s soft-spoken gym
teacher Leonard demonstrative proof of his
convictions, vindicating his quest and forcing
Eric and Andrew’s terrible choice. In so doing,
Shyamalan highlights how the book’s shock
tactics sidestepped the provocative nature of
its premise, and allows for an ending that still
has not settled in my mind months later.
Shyamalan, who has never made a mov-
ie that could be deemed a “social thriller” à
la Jordan Peele, has often arranged his plots
around characters marked by some social
stigma or difference, often one that maps
onto a special ability: Haley Joel Osment’s
second sight in 1999’s The Sixth Sense (and
the unknowing deathliness of Willis’ protag-
onist), the superhumans of the Eastrail 177
trilogy, Bryce Dallas Howard’s blind seeker
in The Village (2004), and so on. His esoter-
ic world-building can cross over into crude
typage: Split seemed to conflate dissociative
identity disorder with supervillainy, while
sanctifying the reductive idea that trauma it-
self can be a kind of superpower.
Detractors are fond of scoring cheap shots
on Shyamalan’s idiosyncratic writing, the
straight-but-slant tone of his dialogue, a
complaint that manages to capture what is
both limiting and exciting about his work.
Some of the lowest moments in his cine-
ma come when the film has little to do but
explain itself, as in the talky middle third
of Glass, which threatens to disappear
into a phantom zone of its director’s self-
mythology. At their best, the films’ urgent di-
alogue about self-doubt and a belief in some
larger design are like small daggers wielded
against an enemy in the dark, as in the mid-
night heart-to-heart that spells out the thesis
of Signs (2002).
To adopt the auteurist’s own conspiratorial
thinking, that Knock at the Cabin, like Signs,
features another isolated homestead under
attack cannot be simple coincidence. In addi-
tion to providing a pressure-cooker scenario
for Shyamalan to flex his preternatural gift for
staging and framing (in concert this time with
two directors of photography, Jarin Blaschke
and Lowell Meyer), the home-invasion prem-
ise has historically given Shyamalan’s faith-
based hokum the kind of visceral charge that
powers great movies. Perhaps one could argue
that it’s a conservative idea, the suggestion
that there are no atheists in foxholes, even
when the foxhole is a cozily well-appointed
woodland getaway.
While the treatment of queerness in
Tremblay’s novel simply provided more fuel
for the epistemological conflict at its cen-
tre—one of the invaders, Redmond (Grint),
had attacked Andrew years before in a bar,
a homophobic hate crime that cannot, to
Andrew’s mind, be a coincidence—by contrast,
Shyamalan refuses to let his central couple
walk away unscathed. Here’s another phil-
osophical Rorschach test: is the suggestion
that persecuted minorities must be prepared
to sacrifice themselves for the good of a world
that hates them an essentially reactionary
idea, one that echoes the historical and very
much ongoing brutality enacted by religious
bigots on vulnerable populations? Or is it a
true affirmation of queer life? In a real sense,
the script’s against-the-grain interpretation
of its source material feels true, and no less
misanthropic than the novel’s implied fate
of a permanent, post-apocalyptic flight from
civilization. There will be no national divorce:
eventually, within our homes or outside them,
we all have to deal with each other.
75
RICEBOY SLEEPS
Anthony Shim, Canada
BY WINNIE WANG
Against hazy landscapes of coastal mountain
ranges and lilac clusters of alliums, Riceboy
Sleeps begins by announcing the arrival of
So-young Kim (Choi Seung-yoon). A recently
widowed mother to Dong-hyun (Dohyun Noel
Hwang, Ethan Hwang), who was born out of
wedlock and thus unable to attain citizenship,
So-young has resettled on the west coast of
Canada from Korea to leave behind her grief
in pursuit of new beginnings. Her son’s illegiti-
macy, and her late husband Won-shik’s schizo-
phrenia—which eventually led to his suicide—
have been redacted from the family tapestry,
even as the curious Dong-hyun probes for
answers. Roughly divided into three acts, for-
mer TV actor Anthony Shim’s follow-up to
his 2019 directorial debut, Daughter, accom-
panies the mother-son pair as they confront
the unrelenting pressures of assimilating
into Canada, adopt varying strategies for sur-
76
vival, and voyage home to initiate reconcilia-
tion with their in-laws following a harrowing
health diagnosis.
Clearly indebted to the coming-of-age
framework that has proved useful for launch-
ing the careers of emerging Canadian direc-
tors (the festival circuit is in love with the gen-
re), Shim’s semi-autobiographical film reflects
his own experience of growing up in British
Columbia during the ’90s. Here, the hyphen
separating “Korean-Canadian” is both a tight-
rope that demands disciplined balance and a
bridge that facilitates exchange, although it’s
hard to believe in give-and-take when you’re
on the receiving end of discrimination in the
classroom and on the playground. Shim’s
16mm camera glides around with an ease that
suggests the haunting presence of an absent
father figure—a spectre, intimately observ-
ing the ones left behind as they navigate lan-
guage barriers, cultural differences, and acts
of discrimination.
Riceboy Sleeps has been widely praised for
its depiction of immigrant experience (it took
the Platform Prize at TIFF and Best Canadian
Feature from the Toronto Film Critics
Association), but sometimes the price to pay
for accessibility is cliché—and unfortunate-
ly, Shim frontloads the film with numerous
scenes that eschew ambiguity in favour of easy
identification. During roll call at school, Dong-
hyun’s teacher attempts various pronuncia-
tions of his new student’s two-syllable Korean
name, before a wildcard guess that simply say-
ing “Kim” might finally yield a response; when
the boy sits in silence, we cut directly to an
after-school meeting with So-young, where
the teacher, with gentle condescension, pro-
poses “David” as the preferred Anglicization.
(Dong-hyun, in an act of malicious compli-
ance, proposes the moniker “Michael Jordan”
instead.) At lunch, the foreign contents of
Dong-hyun’s tupperware elicit a chorus of
insults from classmates, prompting him to
empty his gimbap into the trash bin of a stark-
ly shot school bathroom that swallows up the
six-year-old in the frame; the pejorative nick-
name “riceboy” soon returns when a game of
playground tag goes awry, sending Dong-hyun
on a furious chase for his glasses; and so on.
If the desire for mere representation suffic-
es, these broadly traumatic moments, so ripe
for magnification (and so familiar in other
similarly themed narratives), can seem affirm-
ative, resonating as they do with aspects of
the immigrant experience. Absent, however,
are the nefarious, subtler forms of othering
that Canadians are so skilled at executing,
even in spite of themselves: social exclusion
resulting from failure to participate in cost-
ly extracurricular activities; back-to-school
conversations about summer vacations and
cottage properties; impenetrable cliques that
are mysteriously organized by proximity to
whiteness. In its fondness for blunt, easily
decipherable scenes that serve to instruct
the (hypothetically, largely white) audience,
Shim’s film elides more nuanced shades of the
social isolation visited upon newcomers—the
loneliness of living in a country without gener-
ational wealth or networks. Beyond the disap-
pointment of missed dramatic opportunities,
Riceboy’s set pieces, so carefully manufactured
to generate empathy and guilt (minus any am-
biguity), result in the creation of a protagonist
defined almost solely by victimhood and angst.
By contrast, So-young’s parallel narrative,
which sees her working at a manufacturing
plant, is delivered with impressive restraint
(with the exception of one explosive confron-
tation that unfolds after she is sexually har-
assed by a male co-worker at the water cool-
er). In place of the trite ethnic-lunch trope in
Dong-hyun’s story, which flattens the diaspora
experience, in So-young’s thread we find mo-
ments of communion mixed in with the alien-
ation: So-young rejoices over meeting another
Korean on the factory line, reminisces over a
salted seafood dish called jeotgal, and laughs
with other women of colour about adopting
the same handful of English names within
their community. Even when the screenplay
opts for an unnecessarily cruel irony—forcing
So-young to hurriedly flip through a diction-
ary to translate the word “terminal” while a
doctor explains her cancer prognosis—Choi’s
performance remains a model of behavioural
precision. Whether cooking, gossiping, or ro-
mancing a Korean man named Simon (played
by Shim himself ), she endows So-young with
an autonomous reality that refuses to be sub-
sumed by the character’s tragic narrative arc.
As more time is spent with So-young, whose
relationship to her homeland remains firm,
Riceboy Sleeps reveals its interest in broader
themes of displacement. After she breaks the
news of her terminal illness to Dong-hyun,
the two embark on a trip to make final amends
with So-young’s estranged in-laws in the for-
ested countryside of Gangwon-do. Formerly
a province in the unified Korea, Gangwon-do
was separated into northern and southern
halves after 1945, resulting in the separation
and migration of countless families. Where
So-young ran from her past as a result of her
husband Won-shik’s death and Dong-hyun’s
citizenship woes, Won-shik’s parents were
displaced by political conflict. Generational
trauma is no longer an abstract concept as we
witness Dong-hyun’s paternal grandmother,
one figure in a long line of repressed maternal
figures, vehemently disavow the intruders.
But when his grandfather extends a lunch in-
vitation to the surprise visitors after 16 years
of estrangement, the suggestion is that a cycle
is being broken—the catharsis is understated,
but real.
After stomachs are filled with rice and alco-
hol, Dong-hyun is sent on the rest of his jour-
ney with a backpack containing his father’s
belongings. The camouflage military jacket
tightly stuffed inside falls on his shoulders
perfectly, while the photographs preserved in
plastic slips serve as a source of laughter and
nostalgia. When he shaves his dyed blond hair
and loses his contacts after splashing around
in a bathhouse, Dong-hyun finally sheds the
layers of armour that have weighed heavy
upon him since he was a child. Staring into the
mirror at his physical transformation, he rubs
his bald head and smiles with a shyness that
evolves into pride.
Despite the shaky foundations of its open-
ing scenes, Riceboy Sleeps finds equilibrium
near its end, concluding with heartfelt scenes
of reconciliation and mutual understanding
between mother and son. As So-young strug-
gles with the progression of her cancer, Dong-
hyun insists on medical care and even carries
her on his back after a bout of nausea—a signa-
ture image of care and support that contrasts
pointedly with the loneliness of her original
diagnosis, where her only companions had
been a pen and a notepad. When the pair at
last reach Won-shik’s headstone in the grassy
mountains, Shim’s ever-wandering camera fi-
nally comes to rest, stationed at ground level,
observing their prayers and ancestral offer-
ings from an intimate proximity. The ghosts
are at rest, no longer in need of hovering; the
film ends with a grateful sense of privacy.
77
TORI ET LOKITA
Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne, Belgium/France
BY CHRISTOPHER SMALL
Miike Takashi supposedly believes that there
are no bad movies—for him, something of val-
ue can be learned from each and every one. I
think about that idea often, because I increas-
ingly believe that the definition of a bad film is
precisely one that can’t be learned from. Rare
is the good bad film that makes a genuine im-
pression on you, one whose ideas seem fatally
misguided yet vigorous and authentic. I spend
my days dreaming of a world where all bad
films are as good as Tori et Lokita.
Despite the embarrassed averting of the
eyes performed by the collective critical con-
sciousness when the film made its Cannes
debut, the latest from Jean-Pierre and Luc
Dardenne has nonetheless dutifully contin-
ued its tour of the international festival circuit
(I caught it at the Viennale). If Tori et Lokita
seems too bloodless and miserabilist for most
highbrow cinephiles, its liberal humanist pat-
ina, nomination for the Palme d’Or, and safe-
ly controversial subject matter has ensured
its longevity. (As one guy put it as we were
all shuffling towards the bathrooms, “It was
a hard watch, but at least it was realistic.”)
At every twist and turn of its second-named
protagonist’s descent into an underworld of
brutality and exploitation, the audience at
the Gartenbaukino gasped and let out mousy
squeaks of revulsion; I too had a mouthful
of bile, but only due to seeing how effectively
this was all playing with my fellow
audience members.
78
The Dardennes were once among the last
great narrative technicians, and though their
powers have since diminished they remain ca-
pable of assembling a sound-image narrative
apparatus like few others can, blending tight
plotting with an economical mise en scène and
a keen eye for the elusive power of a gesture.
The adolescent Tori (Pablo Schilis), for ex-
ample, is introduced trying to stir the teenage
Lokita (Joely Mbundu), his older companion
and “sister” (at least that’s what they’re trying
to convince the immigration police of ), as she
lies in bed following an interrogation. After
he wakes her up, she agrees to fix his hair, and
they move, in a single shot, into the next room,
which is adorned with bright pink wallpaper.
This might sound like a small moment, but the
Dardennes are masters of shifting between
artifice and naturalism in this way. A slight
change in the colour scheme of the back-
ground—from mixed to pastel—transforms
our perception of the characters from a lens
of dim naturalism to one of stark iconicity, and
an abundance of little tricks like this link iso-
lated one moment to the next into an extend-
ed, effective narrative chain.
The antinomies of naturalism and artifice
between which the brothers are suspended are
not merely stylistic. Tori and Lokita, perhaps,
lack the apparent moral or emotional com-
plexity of other protagonists in the Dardennes’
oeuvre—even acolytes of their work have sug-
gested that the film reverts to an easy cari-
cature of victimhood that their other films
mostly skirted around. Arriving in Belgium
from Benin, bound together by an emotional
but not truly familial bond, Tori and Lokita
are exploited by all manner of people in all
manner of ugly ways, with the state treating
Lokita in particular with callous indifference.
After being imprisoned, she is eventually shot
and killed by drug dealers while trying to earn
enough money for her and Tori to live; at her
funeral, Tori stands up and condemns the sys-
tem over a microphone, and sings a final song
for her.
Throughout the film, both protagonists
react to the brutality they are subjected to
mostly stoically—particularly Tori, who the
13-year-old Schils plays with an impres-
sive impassivity. Schils’ flatness of affect
has been read by some critics as a flaw, ren-
dering Tori as oddly cipher-like, especially
for a young boy subject to such a spectrum
of violence; for me, it is this shitty film’s
modest strength, directing us away from
heavy pathos and towards the material pro-
cess of moving through this world and its
narrative trappings.
A case in point is a late sequence in which
Tori breaks into a disused building, where
Lokita has for months been locked away to
tend to a giant cannabis garden in exchange
for a sizeable fee. She naturally believes that
this will deliver them of their troubles and
allow them to establish their lives more con-
cretely, without having to further resort to
petty crime and thus get involved with those
who menace the duo for their cut of the earn-
ings. However, the condition for this work is
Lokita’s complete isolation from the world,
and most painfully from Tori.
Sensing that Lokita is not going to make it
without emotional support, Tori convinces
one of the drug dealers to send his drawings to
Lokita, to keep her company. Once he agrees,
Tori thanks him, grabs his bike, cycles home,
runs upstairs, rolls up the paintings together,
and cycles back with them to meet the drug
dealer, who tells him to put them in the trunk
of his car. Tori takes them outside, loads up
the car, and, in a moment, decides to leave the
door slightly ajar; he then heads back inside to
give the keys back. A cut, and the drug dealer is
driving out to the facility, with the concealed
Tori curled up motionless in the footwell of
the back seat. On arriving, the dealer gets out,
and Tori stays hidden for a moment before
slipping out. He watches the guy enter and exit
the building for a few minutes before driving
off, and then skirts around the facility, looking
for a way in, illuminated only by the light on
his phone. Finding a ventilation shaft, he uses
a plank to crawl over to it, and inside finds an
attic lined with aluminium film and stuffed
with ventilation tubes; shuffling a few of them
aside, he drops down into a ventilation room,
is able to push a generator aside, and calls out
to Lokita—who comes and lets him through,
whereupon they share a few slices of pizza and
orange juice.
The above, seemingly over-detailed de-
scription belies the fact that this sequence
plays as a rush of detail, shot and cut like vel-
vet: the material dynamics Tori navigates
around the facility itself; the bright yellow
roll of drawings, visible in the darkness of the
night, balanced perilously over Tori’s shoulder
as he bikes back to the dealer’s car; the repe-
tition and distinctive cadence of Tori calling
his friend’s name (“Lo-ki-TAH”). Later, this
careful establishing of a certain rhythm and
the geography of the space pays dividends
when Tori returns to the facility in the day-
time and gets caught trying to enter through
the same passageway. After a scuffle with one
of the drug dealers, Tori and Lokita break free,
clobber their assailant with a wooden plank,
and escape, which leads continuously, in a se-
ries of handheld shots, to the bleak, cynically
predictable resolution in a patch of forest on
the side of a nearby road. Each point of both
the daytime and nighttime journey is ren-
dered with total clarity, but, in the latter case,
the setting becomes a kind of haunted house
through which the protagonists are dragged—
one where thinly sketched antagonists spring
out from the dark, and where the narrative
trolley is yanked one way and the other at the
whim of the creators.
Thus, the issue with the film is not so much
the blank way Tori or Lokita react to the var-
ious humiliations and indignities they are
subjected to (which at least lets the air out of
the dreariest dramatic beats), but the plot me-
chanics of the merry-go-round themselves. As
in Deux jours, une nuit (2014), the brothers are
rigging a Manichean moral trap for us while,
simultaneously, fulfilling (in the most bor-
ing way imaginable) the generic expectations
of their audience. In this formulation, their
protagonists are caught between freedom (to
exist, to navigate through filmic space) and
entrapment (to be ensnared in narrative boo-
by traps). The Dardennes are much too smart
for this cheap cynicism; the fact that they
mount it all with such deftness perhaps makes
it even more offensive. After Lokita is
forced to strip naked for and be photo-
graphed by one of the workers at the facil-
ity, she tells Tori that she feels disgusting.
“He forced you,” he replies flatly. “He’s the
disgusting one.”
79
81
 SPRING
2023 KINO LORBER
“A HORROR-TINGED NIGHTMARE THAT NODS TO THE SPRAWLING R A L P H F I E N
PRESENTS

N E S
IMPACT OF COLONIALISM ACROSS ERAS. REMARKABLE…AUDACIOUS.”
–GUY LODGE, VARIETY M'L'>EBHML

FOUR QUARTETS

A FILM BY
SOPHIE FIENNES
OF THE ORIGINAL STAGE PRODUCTION

COMING TO THEATERS APRIL 12 COMING TO THEATERS APRIL 19

“Hitchcockian. Offers a fresh perspective on...Pinochet’s Chile.” “Filled with lyrical beauty, acts of barbarism,
–Allan Hunter, SCREEN INTERNATIONAL
moments of magic and unexpected hope.”
– Manohla Dargis, THE NEW YORK TIMES

FROM THE DIRECTOR OF MARTIN EDEN

CHILE 76
’ SCARLET A FILM BY
PIETRO MARCELLO
A F I L M B Y M A N U E L A M A R T E L L I

82 COMING TO THEATERS MAY 5 COMING TO THEATERS JUNE 9

KINOLORBER.COM