film May 31, 2019

Cannes of the Dead

TYPICALLY A PRESSURE COOKER of divided interests and divergent opinions, the Cannes Film Festival concluded its seventy-second edition last Saturday on a rare note of unanimity: a Palme d’Or for the film that happened also to be the critical and popular favorite. The South Korean director Bong Joon-ho took the festival’s top prize for his virtuosic social satire Gisaengchung (Parasite), which was welcomed across the board as a return to form and perhaps even a career peak after a pair of conceptually elaborate if somewhat unwieldy international coproductions, Snowpiercer (2014) and Okja (2017).

print October 2018

Fallen Angels

IN MOST MOVIES, architecture is simply where things happen: a container for action, a background against which drama unfolds. You can see why cinema has seldom made it an explicit subject: The act of photographing space reduces three dimensions to two, and it seems a doubly perverse exercise to confront the mute, static presence of a building with a movie camera. Discussions of architecture in relation to cinema usually concern films by, say, Michelangelo Antonioni or Jacques Tati, in which the built environment is prominent. But over the past two decades, the German filmmaker Heinz Emigholz,

film May 29, 2018

Off Topic

OF ALL THE PRESSURES weighing on a major film festival, the most urgent—and in some ways the most absurd—is the one to be topical. How does a behemoth like Cannes meet the moment, and what would that even mean? As the most powerful film showcase and marketplace in the world, Cannes doubles as an annual referendum on the state of the art and the industry, and two framing narratives dominated this year’s pre-festival coverage. The first stemmed from the festival’s ongoing battle with Netflix, with Cannes positioned as the stubborn old guard defending the sanctity of the cinematic experience against

performance March 16, 2018

Liberté or Death

THE FORTY-TWO-YEAR-OLD CATALAN DIRECTOR Albert Serra has brought his singular sensibility to bear on a remarkable range of works, straddling the film and art worlds with a rare understanding of the contexts of spectatorship and a flair for productive provocation. His films bring the mythic past to life by distilling fabled events to eccentric anecdotes and imbuing figures of legend with the mundane weight of existence. Following the droll anti-adaptations of Cervantes’s Don Quixote (Honor of the Knights, 2006) and the Biblical parable of the Three Kings (Birdsong, 2008), he staged the

print November 2017

MEMENTO MORI

RAINER WERNER FASSBINDER ONCE SAID that he sought to build a house with his films, each one a wall or floor or window—an additive process that would ultimately reveal a representative edifice. This metaphor helps illuminate the wondrous improbability of David Lynch’s eighteen-hour Twin Peaks: The Return (2017). What we have here is not an artist in his twilight years unveiling a crowning capstone, but one with the resources and the will to erect a whole new structure from the ground up: a house built in a single late burst of inspiration, big enough to hold a life’s work.

Directed in full

film June 05, 2017

Squared Circle

FOR THE SECOND YEAR IN A ROW, a rare consensus emerged at the Cannes Film Festival. If the 2016 edition will be remembered for its farcical jury decisions, this year’s official selection stands a good chance of being barely remembered at all: Rarely does the Cannes competition, world cinema’s most pedigreed showcase, leave so little of a collective impression. In stark contrast to the ceremonial merriment of its seventieth anniversary, which occasioned a star-studded Cannes yearbook photo call and a gala evening of musical numbers (Isabelle Huppert warbling “Happy Birthday”) and speeches about

print March 2017

OPENINGS: SKY HOPINKA

THE SEARCHING, striking digital films of Sky Hopinka are complex formal arrangements, conceptually and aesthetically dense, characterized by an intricate layering of word and image. But they are also wellsprings of beauty and mystery, filled with surprising confluences of speech and song, color and motion. A member of the Ho-Chunk Nation of Wisconsin, Hopinka (three of whose shorts are featured in the 2017 Whitney Biennial, opening this month in New York) has described his work as “ethnopoetic,” a term that encompasses several imperatives—among them, the mission to reclaim the ethnographic

print February 2017

NO NOOK OF ENGLISH GROUND SECURE: THE FILMS OF PATRICK KEILLER

IN PATRICK KEILLER’S FIRST FEATURE, London (1994), an unnamed, unseen narrator articulates a theory of landscape on behalf of the film’s equally invisible presiding spirit, a spectral figure named Robinson. Flaneur, aesthete, researcher-for-hire, Robinson believed that “if he looked at it hard enough, he could cause the surface of the city to reveal to him the molecular basis of historical events, and in this way he hoped to see into the future.” Within this curious-sounding assertion lies the very promise of the landscape film, a genre with both materialist underpinnings and mystical overtones,

film June 03, 2016

Toni! Tony! Toné!

FROM WITHIN the media hothouse that emerges annually around the Cannes Film Festival, every edition unfolds as a narrative in progress, from the off-season speculation to the announcement of the lineup through to the bleary days and boozy nights of the event itself, culminating with the final punctuation of the awards ceremony. Which films were not ready and which were snubbed? Did the official competition snatch up the strongest titles or was it upstaged by the parallel sections? Based on the composite of juror personalities and preferences, and the vagaries of behind-the-scenes politics, what

film June 03, 2015

Competitive Edges

THE CENTRAL QUESTION of this year’s Cannes Film Festival, which made headlines for banning selfies and reportedly insisting that women wear high heels at evening galas, was one of inclusion and exclusion. In other words: What does and doesn’t belong on this hallowed red carpet?

The nucleus of Cannes has always been its official competition, a closely watched shortlist of twenty or so titles that compete for the prestigious Palme d’Or. An annual snapshot of the state of the art, this is historically where the firmament of world cinema is established. The competition consumes the festival’s media

print January 2015

David Lynch in Philadelphia

PHILADELPHIA LOOMS LARGE in the personal mythology of David Lynch as a place that both terrorized him and changed the course of his life, his Gomorrah and his Rubicon in one. A product of small-town America, Lynch credits this onetime epicenter of urban blight with instilling in him a fear and disgust so extreme it opened a mental pathway to “another world.” He transfigured the city’s postindustrial dereliction into the infernal wasteland of his first feature film, Eraserhead (1977), and the dying gasps of its manufacturing age—clanking gears, droning machines, venting steam—indelibly

film June 05, 2014

Cannes Get Enough

FORTY-SIX YEARS after he and his comrades stormed the stage at the Cannes Film Festival to shut down the event in solidarity with the workers and students on the barricades, Jean-Luc Godard, now eighty-three, proved that he still has what it takes to stop this circus in its tracks. For those who came here for the films—as opposed to the conspicuous consumption and permanent hangover of this Hollywood-meets-Eurotrash spring break, with its socialite yacht parties, billionaire charity auctions, and luxury-brand pageantry—the single official screening of Godard’s 3-D opus, Goodbye to Language, was

Dennis Lim