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

film June 02, 2013

Wild Palmes

IN THE EYES OF MANY, Steven Spielberg’s jury did the right thing—or, rather, the correct thing—awarding the Palme d’Or to Abdellatif Kechiche’s critically lauded lesbian drama, Blue Is the Warmest Color. Spielberg, who showed his sensitivity to French current affairs by voicing support for his host country’s cultural exception policy at last Sunday’s awards ceremony, presented the Cannes film festival’s top award to Kechiche and his two stars, Adèle Exarchopoulos and Léa Seydoux, just as another horrifying antigay demonstration was wrapping up in Paris, which has this month seen hundreds

film Summer 2013

Matías Piñeiro’s Viola

WITH A GROWING NUMBER of hybrid films drawing on the restless energies of documentary, the Argentinean writer-director Matías Piñeiro stands apart for asserting the latent possibilities of drama. Over four wholly distinctive films, Piñeiro has devised his own variant on interdisciplinary cinema, one that treats theater as a mutable raw material for film and insists on the cinematic qualities of text and language. If many recent art films have made prominent use of nonactors, typically cast as some version of themselves, Piñeiro’s beguiling, hyperverbal movies revel in the transportive

film February 2013

Pablo Larraín’s No

THREE TIMES in Pablo Larraín’s No, René Saavedra, an advertising executive in 1980s Santiago, unveils a pitch to his clients. René (Gael García Bernal) is a young hotshot with a then-fashionable rattail and a soothing boardroom manner, and at each meeting, speaking a lingo of practiced buzzwords, he trots out a near-identical spiel: “What you are about to see is in line with the current social context.” “Today Chile thinks of its future.” One sales come-on is for a soft drink called Free. Another promotes a Dynasty-like telenovela. The third makes the case for ending the murderous dictatorship

film December 29, 2012

What’s Up DOX?

JUST A DECADE OLD, the Copenhagen International Documentary Film Festival—more commonly known as CPH:DOX—already occupies a sizable footprint on the European festival landscape. This ambitious, outward-looking event now boasts multiple ancillary initiatives, including a financing forum and a cross-cultural production project, but at its heart is a strong curatorial stance, an idea of documentary film that is at once distinctive and expansive. Fittingly, one of the themed programs for last month’s tenth anniversary edition was titled “Maximalism,” and it stretched to encompass Leos Carax’s Holy

film December 03, 2012

Rome If You Want To

FOR THOSE WHO FOLLOW this sort of thing, the recently concluded—and newly rebranded—Rome Film Festival doubled as a case study in the ambitions and contradictions of such events today. Seven years into its existence, this upstart festival—stuck, like so many others, in the quagmire of local politics—brought in a big gun, the veteran programmer Marco Müller, just off a widely lauded run at Venice, which happens to be not just the oldest film festival in the world but also Rome’s direct competitor. On paper, Müller’s mandate was clear enough: elevate Rome’s stature and clout by introducing the

film November 19, 2012

Gold Standard

THE VIENNALE TURNED FIFTY THIS YEAR, and as befits an event that shuns red carpets and festival politics-as-usual, it did not make too big a deal of the milestone. While Vienna’s international film festival is not above populist concessions—this edition’s included a tribute to Michael Caine and Ben Affleck’s Argo as opening-night film—it does not by any means cater to all tastes. As festivals the world over succumb ever more to industry pressures and sponsorship demands, the Viennale’s longtime director, Hans Hurch, has repeatedly stressed the importance of programming without strings. (“On the

film Summer 2012

António Reis and Margarida Cordeiro

INCUBATED ON THE LITERAL and figurative margins of Europe, Portuguese cinema can often seem a world unto itself, a semiautonomous territory that evolved at its own pace and at a productive remove from the rest of the continent. The lost years of the Salazar dictatorship and the pent-up energies from decades of repression and dormancy; the deep-seated agrarian tradition and the delayed arrival of industrialization; the vast storehouse of local history and myth and the vibrant cinematheque scene of the post-Salazar years—all have conspired to create in Portugal one of the richest and most

film May 30, 2012

Elephant in the Room

A TUMULTUOUS CANNES FILM FESTIVAL, marked by constant downpours and frequent boos, ended with the restoration of order. For the most part, the decisions of the Nanni Moretti–led jury were a vindication of recent history and the critical consensus. The Palme d’Or went to Amour, by Michael Haneke, who won the top prize in 2009 for his previous film, The White Ribbon. Cristian Mungiu, a Palme laureate in 2007 for 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days, took two prizes (screenplay and actress, split between the two leads) for Beyond the Hills. (The Haneke and Mungiu films were also the joint leaders of Screen

film April 15, 2012

Clear and Present

ROBERT BRESSON DIED IN 1999, leaving behind only thirteen features, an unyielding corpus that has been held up to renewed scrutiny since his death and yet never seems to fully give up its secrets. This is as it should be: Bresson made films of extraordinary clarity and ineffable mystery. (As he himself put it in Notes on Cinematography (1975), the most important ideas “will be the most hidden.”) But the barriers to understanding are not always intrinsic to the work. Especially in the English-speaking world there exists a mythical, not always helpful picture of Bresson as an austere transcendentalist,

film February 11, 2012

Eye of the Tiger

ONE YEAR after marking its fortieth anniversary with an expanded edition (tagged “XL”), the 2012 International Film Festival Rotterdam flaunted a slimmed-down profile. This accelerated cycle of binge and purge surely had much to do with the deep funding cuts that have hit Dutch arts organizations in recent months, but organizers put a positive spin on it, calling it a user-friendly downsizing for a famously sprawling event. While there were indeed fewer sidebars (and somewhat quieter bars), festival director Rutger Wolfson’s claim that Rotterdam could now be “summed up in four sentences” is not

Dennis Lim