James Quandt

• 

  print March 2017

  SHOT IN THE DARK: THE FILMS OF ALBERT SERRA

  “DON’T YOU LIKE THIS HALF-LIGHT?” Casanova inquires of his servant as they travel by carriage through a dim Carpathian forest in Albert Serra’s Història de la meva mort (The Story of My Death, 2013). Like his libertine protagonist, the Catalan director is a connoisseur of obscurity. Shooting his films almost exclusively using available light, which is often scant or even absent, Serra revels in a low-lumen setting—the final scene of his Cant dels ocells (Birdsong, 2008) transpires in a nocturnal murk that renders it indiscernible—so the candlelit interiors of Versailles, the site of

• 

  passages January 2017

  Abbas Kiarostami

  ABBAS KIAROSTAMI’S grievously premature death this past July transformed two of his final works, the art installation Doors Without Keys, 2015, and the film Like Someone in Love (2012), into inadvertent requiems. To discern portents of mortality in the last creations of artists whose expiry is untimely—Mozart’s unfinished Requiem being the most famous and vexing example—is a perilous game, but that has never stopped critics from reading Fassbinder’s Querelle (1982) or Pasolini’s Salò (1975) as auguries of their makers’ own willed demise. Though Kiarostami’s optimistic humanism, his

• 

  print December 2016

  James Quandt

  1 JEAN-MARIE STRAUB AND DANIÈLE HUILLET (Museum of Modern Art, New York) MoMA’s comprehensive retrospective, awaited for decades, proved that the deracinated duo were, like Bresson, the most voluptuary of ascetics.

  2 FROM THE BRANCHES DROPS THE WITHERED BLOSSOM (Paul Meyer) The much-abused term restoration finds authentic meaning in Belgian director Paul Meyer’s long-forgotten 1960 portrait of immigrant coal miners in the Borinage: an emergent classic of neorealist cinema.

  3 SIERANEVADA (Cristi Puiu) Puiu’s brilliant, baleful comedy about a Romanian family gathering could be retitled Waiting

• 

  film November 2016

  Paul Meyer’s Déjà s’envole la fleur maigre

  THE ANNALS OF NEOREALISM must now account for an emergent classic, Paul Meyer’s Déjà s’envole la fleur maigre (From the Branches Drops the Withered Blossom, 1960), shown only sporadically during the more than half-century since it was made, often miscategorized as a documentary, and finally surviving as a single worn 35-mm print and a damaged camera negative, from which the Cinémathèque Royale de Belgique has managed to produce a revelatory restoration. Few discoveries rewrite film history, but From the Branches should at the very least force an auspicious entry into the inventory of unheralded

• 

  print April 2016

  SQUARE FOOTAGE: THE RETURN OF THE ACADEMY RATIO IN CONTEMPORARY CINEMA

  FRANK TASHLIN’S The Girl Can’t Help It (1956) opens with a jape as brazen as the mock money shot in which a tightly attired Jayne Mansfield swivels past an awestruck milkman, prompting the phallic bottle he’s grasping to pop its top and gush its creamy contents all over his hand. Introducing the mammary-mad masterpiece, ’50s everyman Tom Ewell strolls onto a soundstage to inform us that Girl was “photographed in the grandeur of CinemaScope”—the relatively new wide-screen process devised by Hollywood in its attempt to woo viewers away from their television sets—even though the image

• 

  film October 2015

  Jafar Panahi’s Taxi

  IN HIS TRILOGY of immurement—This Is Not a Film (2011), Closed Curtain (2013), and now Taxi—Iranian director Jafar Panahi, banned from making films and placed under house arrest (until very recently, we surmise), has evaded government embargo by surreptitiously shooting movies in, respectively, his apartment, his beachfront home on the Caspian Sea, and a cab traversing the streets of Tehran, transforming his own physical and artistic detention into a metaphor for his country’s psychic imprisonment. (The persecuted Turkish auteur Yilmaz Güney similarly turned his ordeal of incarceration

• 

  passages September 2015

  Manoel de Oliveira

  REMEMBRANCE TRUMPS REVELATION in Manoel de Oliveira’s Visit, or Memories and Confessions— “a film by me, about me”—that the venerable Portuguese director completed in 1982 and then decreed could not be shown until after his death, whether in characteristic deference to nineteenth-century literary tradition (cf. the compulsorily posthumous autobiographies of Mark Twain, John Stuart Mill, and Anthony Trollope) or in observance of an equally obsolete modesty. By the time the cinematic testament was exposed to the world after Oliveira’s decease at the age of 106 this past April (at screenings

• 

  film Summer 2015

  Myroslav Slaboshpytskiy’s The Tribe

  THE ENTOURAGE of sponsors swanning in tenue de soirée into the Miramar cinema at last year’s Cannes Film Festival to attend the awards screening of Myroslav Slaboshpytskiy’s The Tribe—the young Ukrainian director’s debut feature had just taken three major prizes in the Critics’ Week sidebar—were doubtless unprepared for the film’s violent and innovative nature. The initial shock of encountering a work made entirely in sign language without subtitles or voice-over, coupled with the film’s escalating brutality and explicit sex, quickly prompted audible unease among the benefactors and

• 

  print May 2015

  SONGS OF SORROW: SATYAJIT RAY’S APU TRILOGY

  SHORTLY AFTER the death of SATYAJIT RAY in 1992, a trove of materials related to the great Bengali director’s Apu trilogy (1955–59), universally acknowledged as a summit of world cinema, was assembled in London in preparation for a restoration of the three films. But a fire at the film laboratory in July 1993 burned all of the original negatives to varying degrees, and the project had to be abandoned. As decades passed and digital technologies advanced in leaps and bounds, the Criterion Collection (in collaboration with the Academy Film Archive in Los Angeles) began to explore the possibility of completing the restoration. This month, after years of intensive research followed by painstaking physical repairs to and digital scanning of the damaged negatives (supplemented, where necessary, by archival prints), Janus Films is releasing the meticulously—even miraculously—restored trilogy.
   
  To mark this momentous occasion, Artforum asked TIFF Cinematheque programmer JAMES QUANDT, who organized a major retrospective of Ray’s films for the 2014 Toronto International Film Festival, to consider the Apu trilogy’s place within the director’s work half a century after the films’ completion. We are also pleased to present a previously unpublished interview with Ray (the transcript having only recently been unearthed, serendipitously, from our archives) conducted in Calcutta in October 1989 by Artforum publisher ANTHONY KORNER.

  SATYAJIT RAY’S APU TRILOGY, comprising Pather Panchali (1955), Aparajito (1957), and Apur Sansar (The World of Apu, 1959), is a Bengali bildungsroman chronicling the early life of Apu, a boy from an impoverished Brahmin family who moves with his parents from their rural village to the holy city of Benares, then alone to Calcutta, where he attends university, marries, and ends up wandering the countryside after his beloved wife dies in childbirth. Though long celebrated as a summit of the Indian master’s neorealist lyricism, the triptych is not as unassuming and transparent as has traditionally

• 

  film March 2015

  Jessica Hausner’s Amour fou

  The tide buries us all in the end.
  —a Maltese guard, in Jessica Hausner’s Lourdes (2009)
  

  ALLES IN ORDNUNG, the German phrase for “everything’s okay,” implies that all is in order—tidy and organized, in its proper Teutonic place. The young female protagonists of Jessica Hausner’s cinema attempt to impose such order on their surroundings, even as murder, mishap, and malady disrupt the strictly regulated Ordnung of their respective settings: a suburban Viennese home ruled by punitive parents (Lovely Rita [2001]); an alpine inn managed by unsmiling task-masters (Hotel [2004]); a pilgrims’

• 

  print December 2014

  James Quandt

  1 GOODBYE TO LANGUAGE (Jean-Luc Godard) Godard’s thrilling valediction bids farewell to the word and the world, its 3-D effects evoking both the antic (GoPro) and the antique (stereoscope).

  2 AMOUR FOU (Jessica Hausner) One of the great films about the nature of love, Hausner’s precisionist chronicle of the suicide pact between Heinrich von Kleist and Henriette Vogel draws on the paintings of Vermeer and Marie-Denise Villers and brilliantly employs lieder by Mozart and Beethoven—the most telling use of period performance since Straub-Huillet’s 1968 Chronicle of Anna Magdalena Bach.

  3 HORSE

• 

  print October 2014

  TOO GOOD TO BE TRUE: THE FILMS OF JEAN-PIERRE AND LUC DARDENNE

  ANDRÉ BAZIN’S acerbic comparison of film festivals to religious Orders—the capitalization is his—with their analogous rituals, moral obligations, and ceremonies, remains apt six decades after he first made it, in the pages of Cahiers du Cinéma. At Cannes, the festival largely the target of Bazin’s witty derision, the Belgian brothers Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne have, since the appearance of La promesse in the 1996 Directors’ Fortnight, joined the empyrean of directors who have won the Palme d’Or twice, and their films have taken on the aura of holy relics, so universally revered are