Tom Bean and Luke Poling, Plimpton! Starring George Plimpton as Himself, 2013, digital video, color, sound, 87 minutes. George Plimpton.

DESPITE OUTWARD TRAPPINGS OF SUCCESS, George Plimpton’s life was a fugue of failure, beginning, as we learn in the affectionate new documentary Plimpton!, with his inability to obtain any varsity letters at—or to even graduate from—Exeter, the elite New Hampshire prep school. As a scion of a prominent WASP family in an era when that still mattered, he nevertheless managed to matriculate to Harvard and complete graduate studies at Cambridge. None of this made any positive impression on his father, a New York lawyer and supreme exemplar of the Protestant ethic, who constantly sent the young George notes and letters extolling the virtues of hard work and urging him never to postpone till tomorrow what could be done today. These admonitions and the shortcomings that gave rise to them were surely unpleasant to experience at the time, but they instilled in Plimpton a carpe diem sense of adventure and the courage to fight above his weight class (quite literally, in the case of his bout with boxing champ Archie Moore).

It was these qualities, along with a gentlemanly penchant for self-deprecation, that drove Plimpton’s extraordinary, multifaceted career—founding and lifelong editor of the Paris Review, master of “participatory journalism” for Sports Illustrated (which in turn spawned the New Journalism), best-selling author, Hollywood actor, A-list socialite and party host, and, later in life, Orson Welles–style TV pitchman. (YouTube his spots for Intellivision, the Betamax of early home video game systems.) Filmmakers Tom Bean and Luke Poling, who were given full access by Plimpton’s widow to his personal archives, have stitched together copious footage of Plimpton embedded in professional sports and other daredevil situations with his own aural narration and reminiscences to create what could be called a cinematic diary.

Much like the 2011 doc Magic Trip, about Ken Kesey and his Merry Pranksters’ psychedelic cross-country bus trip, Bean and Poling manage to tell Plimpton’s story using almost entirely vintage audiovisual material. Unlike the Kesey doc (and perhaps because Plimpton had more friends than anyone ever), there are some talking-head interviews with family and colleagues, among them Paris Review cofounder Peter Matthiessen, Gay Talese, Hugh Hefner, Robert Kennedy Jr., first wife Freddy Espy, and widow Sarah Dudley. The interview segments are predictably warm and laudatory, though there are intimations of perennial insecurities (Plimpton never felt he was in the same literary league as his famous novelist friends) and WASPish remoteness (the ultimate partygoer/thrower was, at root, hard to know well).

Some surprises for the casual Plimpton spotter: George’s letter asking hero Ernest Hemingway to do an “Art of Fiction” interview for one of the earliest 1950s issues of the Paris Review resulted in a written response from Papa that said, “Fuck the art of fiction…and fuck talking about it” (he eventually granted the interview); a dazed recording captures Plimpton’s deposition to the LAPD after the assassination of RFK by Sirhan Sirhan (whom Plimpton helped wrestle into submission after the shooting); Plimpton may have dated Jacqueline Bouvier before she became Jacqueline Kennedy and, before marriage, was quite the ladies’ man (though, as Hefner notes, he remained “a class act all the way” in this capacity); neither of his wives liked the frequent parties George threw at their Upper East Side apartment, which doubled as the Paris Review offices; Plimpton thought that playing triangle for Leonard Bernstein’s New York Philharmonic was scarier than playing quarterback for the Detroit Lions or goalie for the Boston Bruins.

Plimpton! begins and ends with footage of a nervous George, in pale pink tights, failing (and finally succeeding) at a trapeze maneuver during his stint with the aerial team of the Clyde Beatty-Cole Brothers Circus. His life was indeed a high-wire act, one that is hard to imagine ever occurring again: Bumbling through brutal athletic confrontations by day, attending black-tie bacchanalias by night, always in nice, if rumpled, clothes; somehow finding the time to write and edit a literary magazine, all amid the turbulent crosscurrents of the age—the Cold War, cocktail culture, the sexual revolution, prominent novelists playing bongos three sheets to the wind in the corner of yet another party. George navigated all this with style, as an old-world dilettante—passable at everything, good at nothing—nothing, perhaps, but being George. That, he was good at. And that was more than enough for the many who loved and admired him.

— Andrew Hultkrans

Plimpton! is now playing at the Elinor Bunin Munroe Film Center at Lincoln Center in New York. The film opens in Los Angeles on Friday, June 7.

Richard Linklater, Before Midnight, 2013, color, sound, 108 minutes. Jesse and Celine (Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy).

“EVERY FILM IS A DOCUMENTARY of its actors,” Godard once said—a maxim movingly borne out in Before Midnight, the third installment in Richard Linklater’s unprecedented longitudinal study of Generation X romance. The first film in the series, Before Sunrise (1995), introduced us to Jesse (Ethan Hawke) and Celine (Julie Delpy), twentysomethings who meet on a train in Budapest, disembark in Vienna, and spend the next twelve hours or so roaming the capital city and falling in love. The performers reprised their roles in Before Sunset (2004), which tracks Jesse and Celine’s reunion in her hometown of Paris, their first meeting since that fateful encounter nine years earlier; they spend eighty minutes (shot in real time) volubly cataloguing the enormous disappointments and regrets of the past near-decade while seducing each other anew.

Another nine years have passed as Before Midnight catches up with the characters in Greece: Now in their early forties, Jesse and Celine are an established couple and the parents of twin girls. The family is nearing the end of a six-week stay in Messenia, where Jesse, a successful novelist, has been invited to a writer’s retreat. In much the same way that post–World War II Naples served as a fitting backdrop for the acrimonious couple in Roberto Rossellini’s Voyage to Italy (1954), the majestic ruins of the Peloponnese seem all too fitting for a relationship ignited by a seemingly indestructible passion but now on the verge of crumbling.

Unlike its predecessors, Before Midnight deals not in the lustrous imagined future conjured by two articulate romantics but in the arduousness of the present, those same two dreamers being worn down incrementally by the daily sacrifices and disappointments of long-term coupledom. Part of their weariness, too, is the result of time’s own march—here made all the more poignant by the real-life physical attributes of the middle-aged Hawke and Delpy: thickened torsos, lined faces, graying hair.

Though Before Midnight has the more challenging task of balancing the central couple’s best and worst behavior toward each other, it also stumbles more than its forerunners. While Before Midnight often thrillingly succeeds, as the earlier two films unequivocally did, with the sharpness of its observations—with “the beautiful, specific details,” in the words of Celine, speaking about past lovers, in Before Sunset—it also slips once too often into cliché and gender-essentialist nonsense. At the dinner table, the eloquent octogenarian host of the writer’s retreat, regaling Jesse and Celine and others with the tale of his happy if unconventional marriage, incongruously concludes his narrative with this banality: “But at the end of the day...” Earlier at this feast, Celine gives this advice to a woman two decades her junior: “Let me tell, you, Anna, how to keep a man. Let them win all the silly little games.”

The effect of these Katherine Heigl–isms jarringly breaks the luxuriant spell cast by so many words—Jesse and Celine make Éric Rohmer’s protagonists seem aphasiac in comparison—so beautifully and smartly put together. Linklater, Hawke, and Delpy collaborated on the scripts for both Before Sunset and Before Midnight; though the wince-making lines are the result of joint authorship, they readily recall snippets of dialogue in Delpy’s wobbly post-Sunset rom-coms 2 Days in Paris (2007) and 2 Days in New York (2012), projects that she directed, wrote, and starred in. If this astonishing triptych is to grow to a polyptych, following Jesse and Celine into their senescence, I hope the precision of the language doesn’t deteriorate like the characters’ aging bodies.

— Melissa Anderson

Before Midnight opens in New York, Los Angeles, and Austin on May 24 and nationally in June.

Steven Soderbergh, Behind the Candelabra, 2013, color, sound, 118 minutes. Scott Thorson and Liberace (Matt Damon and Michael Douglas).

CAFTANS, POODLES, POPPERS, toupees, face peels, glory holes, diamonds, and furs: Behind the Candelabra, Steven Soderbergh’s terrific Liberace biopic, shows just what a spectacle the closet could be.

Spanning 1977, the year that Liberace (Michael Douglas) began his relationship with Scott Thorson (Matt Damon), through 1987, when the outré pianist died of AIDS at age sixty-seven, Behind the Candelabra anatomizes not just a love affair but a specific cultural condition. (With its sharp yet never didactic observations, Behind the Candelabra continues the immensely pleasurable social studies that dominate two of Soderbergh’s other recent triumphs, last summer’s Magic Mike and Side Effects, released in February.) The final decade of Liberace’s life marked a paradoxical era when flaming queerness was seemingly everywhere—1977 was also the year the Village People formed—but could never be called out as such. Throughout his career, Liberace sued (and won against) those who insinuated he was homosexual; his management at first tried to insist that his cause of death was cardiac arrest, somehow related to “anemia caused by a watermelon diet.” The folie à deux that Liberace and Thorson, forty years the entertainer’s junior, enacted in private was echoed in the bizarre pact between the flamboyant musician and his fans, all too willing to overlook the obvious.

Based on Thorson’s 1988 memoir and scripted by Richard LaGravenese, Behind the Candelabra quickly establishes the skills Liberace needed for such seduction, whether performing for thousands or just one teenage hunk. “It’s funny that this crowd would like something this gay,” a starstruck Scott, surrounded by even more agog middle-aged women, tells his friend Bob (Scott Bakula), who’s taken the peroxided cutie to the Las Vegas Hilton for his first Liberace show. “They have no idea he’s gay,” says Bob—who had earlier cruised Scott in a West Hollywood bar with Tom of Finland tableaux on the walls and “I Feel Love” playing at eardrum-puncturing volume in the film’s perfect opening scene—before introducing him to Mr. Showmanship himself after the concert.

Scott, who’s spent most of his life in and out of foster homes, quickly falls for the entertainer’s promises to take care of him. (The forty-two-year-old Damon convincingly passes as someone two decades younger, if not quite the eighteen Thorson was when he first met Liberace.) “I want to be everything to you, Scott: father, brother, lover, best friend,” Lee, as he is known to his intimates, declares to his callow lover—a pledge made all too grotesquely literal when Scott obeys Liberace’s request that he get a chin implant to look like the pianist in his youth.

The couple’s adventures in plastic surgery—procedures performed by a hilarious Rob Lowe, here an amalgam of Dr. Fredric Brandt and Andy Gibb—are merely one manifestation of the ermine-draped showman’s perverse penchant for excess. Yet as appetites—not just Liberace’s lust for new flesh but also Scott’s for drugs—and emotions grow ever more unmanageable, neither the movie nor its main actors ever lose control, refusing to succumb to easy, flaccid camp. “Nobody ever took care of me the way he does,” a panicky, sweaty Scott confesses to an indifferent cokehead after a blow binge. This is a film (which may or may not be Soderbergh’s last) about need: for love, for sex, for control, for lies—for more.

— Melissa Anderson

Behind the Candelabra, which premiered in competition at the Cannes Film Festival on May 21, airs on HBO May 26.

Haskell Wexler, Medium Cool, 1969, 35 mm, color, sound, 110 minutes. Ruth and John (Marianna Hill and Robert Forster).

JEAN-LUC GODARD AND CINEMATOGRAPHER RAOUL COUTARD were trailblazers when it came to integrating disjunctive locales, attitudes, and story lines, but writer-director-cinematographer Haskell Wexler’s serpentine Medium Cool (1969) went even further. Observing a TV cameraman-reporter (Robert Forster) as events inexorably move from daily grind to the chaos of the Chicago Democratic Convention, blending naturalistic fiction with on-the-spot cinema verité, the movie shifts between reportage, interrogation of mass-media forms, street-theater satire, and subdued drama (occasionally flaring into melodrama, a livid outburst going up and falling back to earth), all the while balancing sociopolitical eruptions with total immersion in the small, passing details of everyday life.

Wexler ingeniously harmonized clashing elements—personally filming the actual scenes of cops attacking demonstrators and, more fancifully, shooting real footage of National Guardsmen rehearsing for those same clashes with carnivalesque abandon. (Forster, Peter Bonerz, and Verna Bloom were embedded in the scenes, caught up in them but not breaking character.) Playing multiple components off one another inside ardent improvisatory spaces, Wexler made the most courageous American studio film of the 1960s: Next to Medium Cool, high-profile totems of ’69 like Easy Rider and Midnight Cowboy are cushy exercises in retrograde imposture, buckskin swindles perpetrated on the tour-bus trade.

That title is suggestive and flatly opaque—evoking a secret union of McLuhan and Miles Davis, or la nouvelle vague and Mailer’s Armies of the Night. (There is a spiky hotel room scene, ostensibly with cameraman D. A. Pennebaker, fresh from shooting Mailer’s own film foray, Beyond the Law; however, Pennebaker opted out and Wexler had him portrayed by Robert McAndrew, and acting coach and studio operative for Paramount.) A remarkable sense of simultaneity pervades Wexler’s film: The buildup to the convention, punctuated by the assassinations of Martin Luther King, Jr. and Bobby Kennedy, is consciously entwined in all sorts of mundane activities and revealing sidelong encounters. He had a script and had mapped out a definite plan of battle, but Wexler’s main thrust was to let changing circumstances and unfolding history dictate the content of Medium Cool. It is a tremendously open and responsive film, absorbing the bombardment of dislocation and trauma on the fly; the oblique sequence depicting RFK’s murder remains devastating in its quietude, abruptness, and desolation.

Initially, Wexler was assigned to make a movie titled The Concrete Wilderness, about a boy who raises animals in the big city. A sliver of that survives here in the Appalachian transplant Harold Blankenship—a kid who encountered his first walk-in shower in the movie, and whose natural guardedness and curiosity are employed with empathy and care. But Wexler couldn’t resist the call of the American wild, and so he threw a surrogate cameraman into the center of the maelstrom that was 1968, and shot it like a series of fast-moving encounter group sessions. Class consciousness, black militancy, sexual politics, Vietnam, the moral obligations of the man behind the camera, a visit to the roller derby: Medium Cool has a little something for everyone. Including a sense of humor that inflects the film in unexpected ways and places, from the throwaway Washington, DC, sight gag about “four and a half women to every man” to the National Guard drills and roller derby sequences whose satiric appropriations of staged violence anticipate the tone of Robert Altman’s M.A.S.H. Peter Bonerz’s background in the San Francisco improv troupe the Committee has been credited with helping the other actors tune into that wavelength, but some of the best, most unselfconscious work was done by non-actors like Blankenship and the Chicago artists (including the free jazz pianist Muhal Richard Abrams) who hassle their white interlocutors with a deft mix of put-on and put-downs that would do Paul Mooney (or Paul Beatty) proud. The use of Frank Zappa’s music also contributes a measure of irony from and about the counterculture, but one of the most serendipitous routines in the movie comes from the National Guard brigadier general that Wexler filmed directly addressing the camera: He just happens to be a dead ringer for Pat Paulsen from the Smothers Brothers TV show. The line between reality and parody was never so thin.

Clip from Haskell Wexler, Medium Cool, 1969.

Two keys to the film: Verna Bloom and her immaculate disappearance into the West Virginia refugee Eileen, a piece of acting so unobtrusive and nuanced (all about body language, social unease, intelligence, and fortitude flashing up through layers of impoverishment, hurt, and fear) it convinced Hollywood producers she was another nonprofessional. Next to her, Godard’s women were all Brigitte Bardot; she was rooted in the physical world and moved through it in determined, uncertain ways that never let her become an abstraction on someone else’s agenda. The other break for Medium Cool was who it didn’t get for the lead: John Cassavetes was Wexler’s first choice, but he would likely have eaten the film alive. Robert Forster was a more stolid, old-fashioned actor, with strong John Garfield tendencies, but the fact he could play a domineering male without having the outsize presence to dominate the scenes themselves works for Wexler’s conception. He’s part of a larger mosaic, and the slow dawning of that awareness on him is believable precisely in the context of a limited, egotistical man who discovers the limitations of his own ego.

The new Blu-ray and DVD edition of the film contains a typically fine transfer (Wexler was justifiably proud of the fact he shot virtually all the film in 35 mm, including some fantastic pre-Steadicam handheld shots), plus helpful commentaries and an hour-long version of Paul Cronin’s epic making-of documentary “Look Out Haskell, It’s Real!” (Still expanding, Cronin’s full opus currently clocks in around six hours.) It does leave you wishing you could see more than just glimpses of the unused footage, especially those from the dropped subplot about Eileen’s work on the Motorola television assembly line and her introduction to the social activism of Jesse Jackson’s Operation Breadbasket movement in Chicago. Bloom: “I’ve never been to anything like it in my life. We had to get up at 6 o’clock in the morning to get a seat at the meeting at 8. It goes on until noon, and it’s not just a meeting, it’s a political rally, a jazz concert, a soul-singing event.” You get the feeling there’s a whole other unseen movie inside Medium Cool waiting to be assembled from the outtakes.

The movie’s slap-in-the-face ending has always been a source of contention—and rationalization. From here, it looks like the only part of the movie that succumbs to fashionable alienation, radical chic. Consigning its characters to a ditch on the expressway of history like so much roadkill too neatly rhymes with the car accident that opens the picture, but rather than having a “Brechtian” effect, it serves to undermine the sense of class solidarity Medium Cool tentatively establishes. After scenes of Bloom in her plaintive yellow dress walking through a Chicago that could be doubling for Prague when the Soviet tanks rolled in, I can’t help feeling that a less arbitrary ending could have been found, especially from a filmmaker and a film otherwise so resolutely committed to nonviolence.

— Howard Hampton

Medium Cool is available Tuesday, May 21, on DVD and Blu-ray from the Criterion Collection.

Luther Price, Mother (revised), 2002, color, sound, 17 minutes.

EACH MAY, the depressed yet verdant city of Oberhausen, tucked into Germany’s Ruhr industrial valley, plays host to one of the world’s oldest, most storied and important showcases for short films. With a limited local audience composed of rambunctious kinder attending the ambitious children’s programs, the International Short Film Festival Oberhausen attracts an international audience of filmmakers, programmers, professors, and, increasingly, gallery and museum curators who convene for a long weekend’s worth of screenings and discussions. While many festivals have expanded to incorporate installation sidebars, Oberhausen has, over the past decade, successfully engaged the art world, despite repeatedly asserting its mandate to present film and video solely in the cinema. Along with its main and regional competitions (featuring a mix of experimental, documentary, fiction, and animation works), the festival includes the MuVi music video competition, market screenings of artists’ films from nonprofit distributors, a handful of filmmaker profiles, and a newly created and warmly welcomed archive section, in addition to a comprehensive curated program which provides the edition’s main theme, previously guest curated by notable artists and curators such as Akram Zaatari (representing Lebanon in this year’s Venice Biennale) and Ian White, formerly of London’s Whitechapel Gallery.

Following last year’s momentous return to origins with a focus on the Oberhausen Manifesto and the revolutionary beginnings of German avant-gardists Alexander Kluge, Werner Herzog, et al., the fifty-ninth edition of the festival announced that it was high time to tackle our contemporary situation—that is, cinema after the Internet. With its seemingly matter-of-fact title, “Flatness,” this year’s thematic program was conceived by independent UK-based curator Shama Khanna, with curatorial contributions by British artists Oliver Laric, Anthea Hamilton, and Ed Atkins. Though the premise is indeed timely—urgent, even—the theme struggled to take shape (no pun intended) over the course of its eight programs and remained frustratingly vague and amorphous. In other words, it fell flat. The term “flatness” became an easy target for cinema-hungry patrons as incoherence was matched by a number of substandard works (some made for the gallery, others plucked from YouTube) offered up as direct descendents of Robert Bresson’s incomparable corpus, flatness being variously interpreted as a blunting of sensation, a diminishing of dimensionality, technological standardization and globalization, a state of depression, apathy or impatience, a literal collapsing of depth, a poor image, etc.

The event was further hindered by a few too many technical glitches, a canceled performance, and dull digital copies, and one could just as easily deem these to be the very embodiment or essence of the theme—and thus, ironically, an accurate representation of it. The loose curatorial rationale lent itself to a collective desire to dream up alternate approaches, which ultimately points to the pregnant possibilities of the premise and the potency of physical presence inside the cinema. Despite its flaws, the program was not devoid of interesting work, and it included just enough gems to ensure that viewers stuck with it: videos like Richard Serra and Nancy Holt’s Boomerang (1974), John Smith’s still raw and poignant Dirty Pictures (2007), Hito Steyerl twenty-eight-second punchy one-liner, Strike (2010), and Shuji Terayama’s sensual 1977 screen-ripper An Attempt to Describe the Measure of a Man.

But by and large, the festival’s main thrills were to be found elsewhere, especially in the profiles on American artist and experimental filmmaker Luther Price (also a hit at last year’s Whitney Biennial); Paris- and Frankfurt-based, German Super 8 artist Helga Fanderl; and a trio of Croatian directors, Petar Krelja, Zoran Tadić, and Krsto Papić, whose films were shown in prints and digital restorations from the Zagreb Film Archive and Oberhausen’s own collection. Among the standouts of the last group were the utterly endearing 1971 documentary Let Our Voices Be Heard Too, about pirate rural radio stations across the Croatian countryside, and A Little Village Performance (1972), Papić’s portrait of a tiny town’s inaugural beauty contest, which includes some amazingly excruciating and earnest singing performances, unsavory bumpkin stand-up, and, to cap it off, the glummest beauty pageant ever. In just under twenty minutes, the film recalls the raw, awkward wonderment of Jean Eustache’s terrific pageantry two-parter La Rosière de Pessac, from 1968 and 1979.

Helga Fanderl, Geburtstagsfeier (Birthday Fire), 2004, Super 8, black-and-white, 1 minute.

The prolific Fanderl—she’s made upward of six hundred films to date—bestowed a beautiful calm upon the festival with her sublime silent miniatures, radiant in both black-and-white and color. The first program included a selection of Super 8 films made between 1992 and 2009; furtive glimpses of a polar bear taking a plunge, of a lover’s sexy smile, of a still life that breathes and fidgets with vitality, of fireworks exploding near the Eiffel Tower, all rendered with startling immediacy enhanced by the whirring sound of the projector placed at the back of the cinema. Like sketches in a notebook, these shots bore the detectable hand of the artist, as well as her curious and generous vision of the world, surging with sensuality and materiality. Her Mona Lisa (2000) could have been the signature work in the “Flatness” program: a portrait of tourists crowding Leonardo’s iconic painting in the Louvre, their flip-screen digital video cameras multiplying the beguiling muse in a prescient state of mise-en-abymes.

The main event at this year’s festival, however, was, without a doubt, the focus on Price, co-organized with the artist by Light Industry’s Ed Halter. Consisting of three programs of Super 8 and 16-mm films, including an ultrarare double projection of his infamous Sodom, plus a midnight “secret” screening of Clown in a concrete bar located in an unused corner of Oberhausen’s Bahnhof, Price’s films were loud even when silent, eloquent in their bravery and abrasiveness. (He often abrades the celluloid’s sound track, as would an engraver.) Above all, they were vibrantly, resiliently, if painfully, alive. Psychological and aesthetic repair are threaded through the films, with trauma and turmoil branded into their imagery as much as their material, cancerous and uncontained. Disarming in their candor and obsessive rehearsals, they cut to the core and reveal an artist whose love of cinema has given him the strength to deal with the cruelty of life. A portrait of his mother reveals his admiration for Sirkian melodramas, for a Bette Davis or Barbara Stanwyck–like glamour that defies reality’s vulgar truths. Standing before the ocean in a billowing emerald dress with matching necklace, her hair tied behind a butterfly-printed scarf, and wearing canary-colored sunglasses, Price’s mother transcends home-movie status. With emotional and formal intensity, intimacy and abstraction, Price’s films rendered flatness an implausible state for those of us who turn to the art of cinema for meaning and mystery.

— Andréa Picard

The fifty-ninth International Short Film Festival Oberhausen ran May 2–7, 2013.

Tinatin Gurchiani, The Machine Which Makes Everything Disappear, 2012, digital video, color, sound, 97 minutes.

“MEMORY IS WHAT WE RECORD IT TO BE,” filmmaker Peter Wintonick said at the conference of the eighteenth “It’s All True” (IAT) documentary festival. No one understood this better than Soviet filmmaker Dziga Vertov, whose montages extolled the Bolshevik revolution. In collaboration with the Austrian Film Museum, the festival, with over eighty titles reaching five Brazilian cities, staged a Vertov retrospective, comprising early newsreels, shorts, and seven full-length films.

From reverse to stop-motion and concealed camera positions, Vertov embraced cinema’s ability to awe and to estrange. In A Sixth Part of the World (1926), his kaleidoscopic vision spans modernizing cities and the Siberian taiga, with machinists, huntsmen, and shamans made to embody the Soviet nation’s latent energies. At the end of his first feature not made of found footage, Kino-Eye (1924), Vertov cuts away from young pioneers to a circus elephant in Moscow. His digressive art later influenced Chris Marker and Jan Švankmajer, among others.

Vertov wanted to capture political reality. Similar ambition fuels Jango (1984), by Brazilian director Sílvio Tendler, also honored with a retrospective. A historical documentary, Jango, a nickname of Brazil’s president João Goulart (1961–64), is elegiac in tone, but critical in its destabilization of the coup that deposed him. Mistrusted by the United States and antagonized by the right-wing military, Goulart is evoked as a candidate popular with the base and committed to agrarian reforms. His subsequent exile in Uruguay shows him a marked man. Weaving archival material and interviews with the junta generals, Tendler captures the conspiratorial atmosphere that surrounds Goulart against the background of the Cold War.

A number of festival offerings touched on the fall of the Soviet bloc, including the international competition winner, The Machine Which Makes Everything Disappear (2012) by Tinatin Gurchiani, and Private Universe (2012) by Helena Třeštíková. Třeštíková’s chronicle, begun in 1974, tracks a Czech family over four decades. Minutely recorded personal triumphs—a child’s first tooth, a new Trabant car—set up a comic tension with historic events and popular culture, shown via old television clips. The Machine Which Makes Everything Disappear is communism’s bleak coda, with Georgian youth—a boy who recalls bombings, a girl who confronts her absent mother—among the haunted protagonists. In place of Vertov’s depersonalized cosmic cine-eye that stressed the collective, Gurchiani and Třeštíková use the camera as a social microscope to celebrate the individual.

Among the festival highlights was American director Alan Berliner’s First Cousin Once Removed, 2013. Screened in the special program, Berliner’s collage-like film depicts his cousin, renowned translator Edwin Honig, who’s succumbed to what Berliner calls a “poet’s Alzheimer’s.” By turns pointedly lucid and oblivious as to the identity of those around him, including his two adopted sons, Honig displays an increasingly tangential attachment to his past that redefines what makes us human. The specter of language, at times reduced to childlike cooing and grunts, haunts the film. The found footage of Honig reading his poetry is mute, an apt metaphor for the impossibility of a filmmaker’s adequately capturing reality. Montage not only is Berliner’s method of discovering a storyline in the editing room, but also stresses his belief that, in the end, any portrait—committed to memory, or on film—remains fragmentary.

Sensory memory and language also lie at the heart of Israeli filmmaker Avi Mograbi’s captivating Once I Entered a Garden (2012). In the film, Mograbi accompanies his former Arabic-language teacher, Palestinian Ali Al-Azhari, to Saffuriyeh, a village from which Al-Alzhari’s family was expelled in 1949. Though not clearly linked, the Super 8 and 16-mm clips, and an unknown woman’s love letters read in voice-over, function as a collective memory. By recalling the aura of Beirut threatened by war, they echo Al-Alzhari’s displacement.

In a striking scene, Al-Azhari’s young daughter, Yasmin, from his marriage with a Jewish woman, flees the playground in Saffuriyeh (now Zippori) whose sign forbids foreigners to enter. Yasmin fears the law that pronounces her race non grata, but returns to stir the earth around the sign. Al-Azhari notes that “foreigners” is misspelled, a double dismissal. In an earlier scene, perusing old family photos, he acknowledges the psychic comfort that Mograbi derives from seeing his deceased father as a victim rather than aggressor. He would have thought the same had it been his father. The dialectical moment, one of many in this deeply self-reflexive film, captures memory as a construct that is multifaceted yet necessarily incomplete.

— Ela Bittencourt

The eighteenth edition of É Tudo Verdade (It’s All True) first ran April 4–14th in São Paulo; it will reprise August 20–25 in Belo Horizonte, Brazil.